New Delhi: Organisations working for the Bhopal gas tragedy survivors on Thursday said an expert committee has prevented a study study that showed that women exposed to the gas in 1984 gave birth to children who were significantly more likely to have “congenital malformations” than children born to women unexposed to the gas from being published, according to The Hindu.
On the night of December 23, 1984, methyl isocyanate leaked from a pesticide manufacturing plant at a Union Carbide India Ltd factory in Bhopal, killing around 3,000 people and injuring thousands more, per official estimates, around the city.
The committee held that the study was methodologically flawed, poorly designed and that its findings were inconclusive. Multiple other committees had reviewed the study’s design and methods before the government commissioned it, at a cost of Rs 48 lakh.
The expert committee included scientists from AIIMS Delhi, the National Institute for Research in Environmental Health (NIREH) in Bhopal and the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR).
Activists fighting for the survivors to be properly compensated publicised the study at a press conference in Bhopal, after obtaining it through an application filed under the RTI Act. The activists questioned the committee’s decision to keep the data out of the public domain and alleged that the ICMR was suppressing information.
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“The documents we have obtained from [NIREH] reveal that its parent organisation, ICMR, decided against publishing the … study [with] damning facts, that mothers exposed to the tragedy are begetting children with defects,” Rachna Dhingra, a meber of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, said at the press conference.
Dhingra also alleged that three meetings of the government’s Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) discussed the study, which researchers conducted between January 2016 and June 2017, in the course of three meetings. “The documents further show that when the findings were presented at another SAC meeting in December 2017, members expressed concern about the high incidence of malformed children and raised several queries related to quality … of data,” she said.
“At the SAC meeting in October 2018 the members agreed that ‘as the said project had flaws … the results are erroneous and thus should not be brought into the public domain,” adding that this had been done at the behest of Dow Chemicals, which purchased Union Carbide after the Bhopal disaster.
Rashida Bee, the president of the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karmchari Sangh, said, “If the study’s design was indeed flawed, how was it approved at three successive meetings over two years? If mistakes have been made, why hide them from people?”
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Ruma Galgalekar, a scientist at NIREH and the study’s principal investigator, and her team reportedly examined 1,048 babies born to women who had been exposed to the gas as children and the newborn grandchildren of women who had been pregnant and exposed to the gas. The control group comprised 1,247 babies born to women who had not been exposed to the gas.
According to the report, 9% of 1,048 babies born to women exposed to methyl isocyanate had congenital malformations, compared to only 3% of babies in the control group.
The Supreme Court has admitted a curative petition demanding more compensation for those affected by the gas leak. Dhingra told The Hindu that data on congenital defects in children could help secure proper compensation for the victims.
The first study, commissioned in 1985 to examine the effects of exposure to the gas on the infants of pregnant women, found that defects were apparent in 14.2 of every 1,000 births (compared to 12.6 per 1,000 among children in the control group). However, the government had deemed the findings to be statistically insignificant.
(With inputs from PTI)