Victims’ advocacy organizations continue to demand fair compensation and criticize the tourist use of the factory 40 years after the tragedy. Some 22,000 people have died since 1984, half a million suffer from aftereffects,

Forty years ago, the Union Carbide plant exploded in Bhopal, India, causing contamination that killed at least 20,000 people. Its health and environmental impacts persist, along with the victims' ongoing fight for justice against unaccountable corporations.

The disaster did not come as a bolt from the blue. Between 1982 and 1984 a local journalist from Bhopal, Rajkumar Keswani, published several stories on safety lapses at the Union Carbide plant. On 26 September 1984, one of Keswani’s articles presciently warned ‘Bhopal [is] sitting on the brink of a volcano’.

Forty years ago, on the intervening night of December 2-3, a terrible tragedy struck Bhopal as highly toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC) leaked from American company Union Carbide’s pesticide factory in the city.

Just after midnight as poisonous plumes of smoke wafted through the Indian city of Bhopal four decades ago, Gas Devi was born, gasping for every breath.

Saroj Bhattacharjee, 81, calls it the “biggest trauma” of his life. The Edmonton man was a maintenance engineer at Union Carbide in Bhopal, India, in 1984, when the toxic gas methyl isocyanate leaked from a storage tank.

Considered the world’s worst industrial incident in modern times, the Bhopal gas tragedy was a chemical accident at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India.