Author Archives: Jawad Chaudhrey

Immediately following the gas release, Union Carbide Corporation began providing aid to the victims and established a process to resolve their claims. Among the many efforts Union Carbide took to address the situation were:

• Organizing a team of top medical experts to help identify the best treatment options and work with the local medical community;
• Providing substantial amounts of medical equipment, supplies and expertise to the victims;
• Openly sharing all its information on methylisocyanate (MIC) with the Government of India, including all published and unpublished toxicity studies available at the time;
• Dispatching a team of technical MIC experts to Bhopal on the day after the tragedy, which carried MIC studies that were widely shared with medical and scientific personnel in Bhopal;
• Establishing a $100 million charitable trust fund to build a hospital for victims, and
• Offering a $2.2 million grant to establish a vocational-technical center in Bhopal to provide local jobs.

In 1989, Union Carbide and UCIL entered into a $470 million legal settlement with the Indian Government that settled all claims arising from the incident. The Indian Supreme Court affirmed the settlement and described it as “just, equitable and reasonable.” Union Carbide and UCIL promptly paid the money to the Government of India. (Please see “The Incident, Response and Settlement” section of this website for additional information on UCC’s efforts and contributions.)

An India media report in September 2006 stated that the “registrar in the office of Welfare Commissioner… said all cases of initial compensation claims by victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy have been cleared… With the clearance of initial compensation claims and revision petitions, no case is pending…”

Browning, Jackson. “UNION CARBIDE: DISASTER AT BHOPAL.” Union Carbide. N.p., 1993. Web. 25 Apr. 2013.
<http://www.bhopal.com/~/media/Files/Bhopal/browning.pdf>

Even though this is not recent news, I think this shows one of the few techniques they used in 1967 to succeed internationally.

*I can’t copy and paste the text in the link so click on the link to read the article, it is very short.

http://search.proquest.com.remote.baruch.cuny.edu/docview/133197447/fulltextPDF?accountid=8500

I thought this would be useful to see how it decided how to enter certain markets:

A New Business Development Department was formed in 1970 to coordinate the three areas outside of chemicals and plastics that Wilson didn’t sell: Biomedical Systems, Marine Foods, and Agricultural Systems. Another key organizational change was the disbanding of the Consumer & Related Products Division, which had contributed 22 percent of UCC’s annual revenues. The Eveready business was split off into a Battery Products Division, while Glad and Prestone were coordinated in a division with the production of their raw materials. Despite the fragmentation of the Consumer Products Division, Wilson said that he hoped that consumer products would contribute 50 percent of UCC’s revenues in the future. He recognized that these relatively stable, high-margin product lines sustained Union Carbide through economic downturns.

For a few years, it looked as if the new strategy was working. From 1973 to 1981, earnings per share rose 100 percent. UCC increased productivity dramatically during the late 1960s and early 1970s to keep its corporate head above water. From 1967 to 1973, physical output of chemicals and plastics rose 60 percent, while per-pound production costs were cut by one-third. William S. Sneath continued these trends when he became chairman and CEO in 1977. Still, the company found itself increasingly strapped for cash. Steadily rising expenses in Europe resulted in a $32 million loss in 1978, which forced Carbide to divest virtually all of its European petrochemicals and plastics operations. That same year, UCC was forced by its creditors to retire $292 million in long-term debt, which forced it to borrow another $300 million in 1979. That year, Carbide’s Standard & Poor’s credit rating fell from AA to A+, and its stock fell as low as 42 percent below its $61 book value.

Chairman Sneath embarked on another round of cost-cutting in 1980, pruning the executive staff by 1,000 and divesting a total of 39 businesses. Sneath retained six primary businesses: graphite electrodes, batteries, agricultural products, polyethylene, and industrial gases. By 1980, Carbide had 116,000 employees at over 500 plants, mines, and laboratories in 130 countries, bringing in over $9 billion in annual sales. Sneath embarked on a plan to invest profits into high-margin consumer goods and specialty chemicals.

UCC had established battery plants in India as early as the mid-1920s, and had seven plants with 5,000 employees there by 1967. India’s chronic food shortages precipitated a government-sponsored “Green Revolution” in the 1960s, with the country’s socialist government eager to join Union Carbide in establishing pesticide and fertilizer plants. In 1975 the Indian government granted Union Carbide a license to manufacture pesticides, and a plant was built on the sparsely populated outskirts of the regional capital of Bhopal. The plant drew more than 900,000 people to Bhopal by 1984. Union Carbide officials estimated that at least five tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC) seeped out of the plant in just 30 minutes one day in December 1984. The accident killed over 2,300 people and permanently injured another 10,000. Newsweekmagazine called the incident “the worst industrial accident in history.”

Source – http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/union-carbide-corporation-history/

“The tragedy of Bhopal continues to be a warning sign at once ignored and heeded. Bhopal and its aftermath were a warning that the path to industrialization, for developing countries in general and India in particular, is fraught with human, environmental and economic perils. Some moves by the Indian government, including the formation of the MoEF, have served to offer some protection of the public’s health from the harmful practices of local and multinational heavy industry and grassroots organizations that have also played a part in opposing rampant development. The Indian economy is growing at a tremendous rate but at significant cost in environmental health and public safety as large and small companies throughout the subcontinent continue to pollute. Far more remains to be done for public health in the context of industrialization to show that the lessons of the countless thousands dead in Bhopal have truly been heeded.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1142333/

A link we should all look over, a lot of useful information.

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