 I'm very honoured to be part of this event and honoured to introduce the speakers and chair the discussion. The first thing I want to say is actually our audience is much bigger than those of us in this room. The event is being live streamed to Bhopal. It's also being live streamed to the Oxford India Society, the University of Durham and Leeds University, and we hope that there will be some other organisations who will be able to watch the live streaming as well. At a later point this whole event will be available as a podcast. I think it's critically important that we remember the people who have been killed and those who died much later as the result of the effects of the Bhopal disaster. And that we also remember those who still live with and survive with its effects. Bhopal has become a central focus I think for wider movements around environmental justice which is my own area of interest. I'd like to be able to say today that following 30 years on from Bhopal that other communities around the world have not suffered as a result of industrial disasters. But unfortunately I can't say that. If we approach industrial disasters via thinking around environmental justice, we can think through how the current political, economic and social world order mean that the consumption of resources by some of us can place disproportionate burdens on other communities. And it's often the world's poorest and most marginalised people who live with more than their fair share of the burden of hazards and risks that arise as a result of our current order. There's a clear need to explore the links between corporate crime and environmental justice and Bhopal has become a key focus for that. Very early formulations of the environmental justice movement coalesced around ideas of environmental racism and this critically interrogated the relationship between race and poverty and looked at the spatial distribution of waste and industrial sites that produced pollution particularly in the US and focused our minds on the fact that it was poor of black and African American communities in the US who were being deliberately targeted as the possible sites for polluting industries. Now the environmental justice movement encompasses a much wider range of issues campaigning for sustainable transport for food justice for issues around deforestation, lead poisoning and biopiracy. And environmental justice activists also work with people dispossessed from their lands to make way for new UN red climate mitigation schemes. And those who may in the future be displaced as a result of the new announcements of a raft of new marine protected areas that were just announced at the World Parks Congress at which I was at last week. We need to question the idea of industrial disasters I think. They're often referred to as accidents but in essence these are not accidents. They're produced phenomena arising from the way that the world is currently organised and we can see that through a more recent example which was the toxic waste trade and a company named Traffigora. It says that it's a logistics company which applies intelligence and resource and logistics capabilities to match producer and consumer interests. But in 2006 it was implicated in dumping toxic waste in Cote d'Ivoire and it killed 17 people but up to 100,000 people in the area suffered various degrees of ill health and continue to do so. The waste was dumped in various sites around the capital Abidjan and the company entered into an agreement with the country's government to pay 200 million US dollars in return from immunity from prosecution. The company was so powerful that it was even able to take out what later became known as super injunctions in the UK. Which meant that journalists couldn't even refer to the fact that there were investigations against the company let alone what the nature of those investigations were. And while the company's had to pay 300 million pounds in legal costs over the last five years, the compensation is minimal compared to what they might have had to pay had they dumped the same toxic waste in London or New York. And still the regulatory frameworks around international trading and disposal of toxic waste are inadequate. So Traffigora's actions in Abidjan or Union Carbide in Bopal, we could question they're not accidents, they are in fact produced phenomena. The result of the concerns about maximising profit, a disregard for labour rights, a disregard for the environment and for issues around social justice and that they're entirely avoidable. And I'm sure we'll hear more about these issues as the evening goes on. So I'd like to introduce our first speaker, Vandana Shiva, who is a philosopher, an environmental activist, a world famous author and eco feminist who has authored more than 20 books. She's currently based in Delhi and she was trained as a physicist receiving her PhD from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. She's one of the leaders and board members of the International Forum on Globalisation and she's a well-known figure in the global justice movement known as the Alter Globalisation Movement. And I'll hand you over to Vandana if you'd like to come up. Thank you so much and thank you also to the Bopal Medical Relief for organising this evening. Of course I would, there's only one other place I would rather be and that would be with Champa Shoklai and Rashida B and others. 30 years they've continued to struggle and continue to make a difference and are such an inspiration to the rest of us. Bopal, of course, has shaped so much of the world we know. It has shaped my own life's trajectory. I do what I do today because of Bopal. It wasn't part of my original plan working on biodiversity, poison-free agriculture, globalisation. It's all come out of the engagements Bopal. I remember rushing down as soon as we were allowed to visit the city with the saplings of neem, this wonderful tree that's a natural pest control agent. And hand-designed posters saying no more Bopals, plant and neem because the idea that we need pesticides for agriculture is itself the beginning of the tragedy. And the tragedy begins in the wars, in the concentration camps, the time where these chemicals that are today's pesticides were really designed to kill people. And I so agree with you that if something's designed to kill, it will kill. It's not an accident. It's just that in Bopal it came as a concentration, but those pesticides are killing people all over the world all the time. Farm workers, farmers, children, people getting cancer and other diseases. So I made a commitment in 84 to both understand why industrial agriculture was so violent in its roots and why these chemicals were used, but also to build an alternative. And of course, the reason industrial agriculture is so violent is, as I said, it comes out of the war. Its thinking is from the war, its entire structure. The fact that these companies have so much power is because they've used the power to introduce the chemicals in the first place. And the Bopal story 30 years later, 30 years of globalization, of course has become a story of Dao. It's become a story of Dao linked with the five other chemical giants that today control the seed supply. And it's basically a story of the push of inevitability of the use of toxics, whether they're chemicals or they are pesticide-producing plants, the genetically engineered crops, with only two applications, herbicide-tolerant and BT-tolerant crops. And my very favorite company, Monsanto, works closely with Dao. They are revolving all the current generations of GMOs. They are part of what I call the seed cartel, just five of them. And at the heart of what started in Bopal and has continued to be intensified is this, I call it an ontological schizophrenia, of wanting to own when it comes to profits and disown when it comes to responsibility. When Dao buys up union carbide, it continues to say we have no liability in the courts. They own the profits of union carbide, but somehow they have this convenient immunity they've created for themselves. And this is exactly the same kind of schizophrenia that plays through the current generation of toxics through genetic engineering when it comes to owning the seed, corporations like Monsanto and Dao say we've invented the seed, we are the owners, we are the makers, we should therefore have property rights and seed. And farmers should not be allowed to save seeds. And they get the claim to property rights on the ground that they're making something new. They even managed, and Monsanto's on record saying that they literally wrote the intellectual property rights agreement of the World Trade Organization, especially article 273b, which relates to ownership of life forms. I won't go into detail for lack of time. But there was another set of laws and I had a big role in it that came out of the Earth Summit, the Convention on Biological Diversity, which is an article 19.3, which says that all genetically modified organisms should be assessed for safety. It's an obligation of governments. Most governments are signatories, the US is not. This country experienced the first attack on a scientist who did the work on biosafety, Dr Arbat Putzai, 98. He was asked by the government of UK to look at the potential impacts of GM potatoes. He did. He didn't expect to find what he did. So he went to his director and said, you know, three months of rats feeding studies give you all these damages. What will happen when humans eat the stuff all their lives? And for one day it was all over the media and the next day his lab was shut. He was silenced when he was talking about the silencing of journalists. He was silenced. And he's now gone back to Hungary. He'd come from Hungary. And as he said, when he returned to Hungary, I came to the West for freedom. I'm going back to Hungary for freedom. Because under corporate rule, there is no freedom. And we have witnessed scientists after scientists being hounded. So when these issues of safety are concerned, whether it's Bhopal or it's the GMOs, then the excuse is, no, no, no, it's just like nature made it. There's nothing new. There's no hazard. You can assume safety and never have to look for it. But something more serious is happening and it's really started. I mean, all of you know the details of the various court cases, whether it's the Supreme Court or the US courts. While they arrest Norega from Panama and say anything related to the US will be tried in the US, when it comes to Bhopal, they send the cases back and say it'll only be tried on Indian soil. Suddenly the principle changes. But what's happening right now and what could happen in the future if we don't build on justice for Bhopal is extremely serious. And the two very serious things that are in the making, are unfolding, is not only do corporations want to escape liability, they want to now claim personhood. It's a total leap in the construction of politics, society, ontology, what have you. Now corporations have been known to be legal entities with legal responsibilities and legal rights, which should in any democracy be defined by society. But a series of cases, and Dow is very connected to them, is creating this idea of corporate personhood and the idea of killing democracy and people's rights as the freedom of speech of corporations. This has happened in the state of Vermont, which most countries of the world have labelling laws. Europe has labelling laws for GMOs. But the US doesn't. It's because of the influence of the companies. But people have been trying desperately to get labelling laws. And again, I won't go into the details, but Vermont got a labelling law passed being sued by the corporations to say the corporations are persons and people coming to know what they're eating and having the right to know is an interference in the free speech of the corporation, which in effect means corporate free speech is the right to kill. If we assume corporations are persons and if they have free speech, then their free speech is the right to kill. And we just can't accept it. The point is the US courts have started to rule in that way. On the 4th of November, the US had some midterm elections and they have a strained system where they can add stuff related to local levels. And a tiny county in Hawaii called Maui put on the ballot a vote for being GMO free and the vote one inspired of millions being poured by the family of corporations. As soon as the Maui vote went through saying we are banning GMOs, Dow and Monsanto jointly sued Hawaii, sued the county and the state and said you can't ban us, basically again free speech. And it's not just that this is happening only in the Americas because there is a free trade treaty if you think of the trajectory of globalization beginning with the so-called free trade of the WTO. The latest generation of free trade treaties is to achieve what the WTO could not. The three things the WTO could not achieve because of movements, because protests is very, very broad intellectual property rights, very broad scope. No precautionary principle, no ability to prevent any potentially harmful introduction of a substance and organism. But the third element that is sought to be achieved, they couldn't even have imagined at the time of WTO, but they really are taking it for granted, which is again this corporate personhood. Because in the new free trade treaties, like TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, they are clauses of what are called investor state suits. And just like states can be sued in Maui, in Vermont, where people democratically implement a law to protect themselves, if such things happen in the future in Europe, corporations can take the governments by law, by right, to not to courts because courts would be governed by constitutions and they wouldn't be able to get their injustice as a right. They'd go to tribunals, stocked with this right to free trade, right to kill, right to profit at any cost. So, the journey from Bhopal of corporate crime, as you mentioned, the journey of this absolute rights with absolute irresponsibility that is what corporations are seeking, cannot coexist with democracy or safety. It just and justice, it cannot coexist. And that's why continuing to fight for justice for Bhopal and continuing to fight for justice everywhere where there's a Bhopal, because you're wearing a t-shirt, we all live in Bhopal, because every place is a mini Bhopal of various orders. Bhopal continues to be the worst disaster, but smaller disasters are happening. And it's all connected through a toxic legacy, toxic products, toxic mindset, toxic systems of governance, toxic ideas of who makes decisions and who's a person. I think corporate personhood is a toxic idea which we shouldn't allow to grow any further and only strong movements, creative actions can stop it, so all strength to you, all strength to our sisters in Bhopal and we'll continue. Thank you. Thank you for that fascinating speech. Our next speaker is Ravi Rajan, who is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was educated at the universities of Delhi and Oxford and between 2012 and 2014 he's been visiting senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. Thank you for having me here and thanks to all of you for coming here. This is a difficult day for me personally because I still remember the faces more than 30 years ago when I stayed and worked in Bhopal. It's difficult to see this picture. It's simply difficult to be here. It is one of those extraordinary events in one's life that continues to haunt. I think this comment that we are all in Bhopal now is more true today than ever before for all the reasons that Vandana talked about. I however chose to talk about something related but different. I'm going to call it the banality of good and I'm just going to read it out because I knew that I'd be far too emotional to extemporate the way Vandana can and no one else can. In one of the few moments in which Robert McNamara, the former US Defence Secretary showed any emotions in his film, biographical film The Fog of War, he weaped whilst recalling his decision about the site in the Arlington National Cemetery in which to bury the recently assassinated President Kennedy. He didn't cry about the 25,000 people who are killed in Vietnam. India does not have its equivalent of an Arlington Memorial but in a strip by the River Yamuna in Delhi and in assorted cities across the country are memorials for many a politician. The victims of the world's worst chemical disaster however have thus far received no significant at least state sponsored memorial. If they receive any attention outside Bhopal and small courtry people who follow Bhopal, it is during moments like this in anniversaries. Here too, these rituals of mourning have been reduced often to soundbites about unaccountable corporations, inadequate compensation and governmental apathy. There are discussions about the merits and demerits of globalization, people express their views and life goes on. Bhopal is without doubt symbolic of corporate accountability, governmental apathy and arguably, the dangers of globalization. Beyond these headlines however are real people who've been suffering for three decades. Also beyond these headlines is something that is at once critical and banal and yet largely absent, not only in India but all over the world as we've seen in the aftermath of civil events elsewhere from Chernobyl to Katrina. I refer to the expertise needed to help societies cope with disasters. Bhopal showed that we fail in five distinct facets. At the very outset is the absence of what might be called contingent expertise. It refers to an administration's preparedness to respond immediately and effectively to a potential hazard. It is concerned therefore with the conscious adaptive mechanisms and institutions built by governments prior to cataglysmic events. Such institutions include obvious things like warning systems, evacuation procedures and other measures that help mitigate the societal impact of a disaster in the immediate aftermath. The absence of contingent expertise is most evident in two specific types of context. One of these involves novel hazards such as industrial and technological accidents. I don't think they should be called a novel anymore in any case. Bhopal is a prime example in this regard. The other context in which a scale of a disaster is immense. Just looking at India, the Orissa cyclone of 1999, the Gujarat earthquake of 2001 and the several floods that have dogged the Himalayan regions in recent times illustrate this trend. In both novel accidents and large scale calamities, the absence of contingent expertise is a consequence of the scope of the hazard exceeding state capacity to cope with it. We just aren't prepared to cope with these enormous events and yet we persist in technologies and deploying these technologies that will potentially cause these events. Critically, in each of these two types of cases, three critical features present themselves present in successful adaptive systems set up to meet the threat of low scale environmental disasters are missing. The first of these is hazard awareness. In each case, the respective governments fail to scope out potential hazards and generate systematic data on potential threats. The second missing effort feature involves efforts on the basis of such awareness to minimise either the onset of the threat or its impact when an event occurs. The third missing feature is the absence of the infrastructure needed to effectively respond to a disaster, should one ensure. Such infrastructure includes the deployment of appropriate technological systems, the provision of adequate training to designated staff and effective risk communication procedures in the wake of a hazardous event. The experience of erecting functional institutions to deal with conventional disasters of low intensity however indicates that there is no reason why novel or large scale disasters cannot be subject to effective and successful contingent planning. In other words, we embrace the profits but not the amount of effort it takes to embrace the responsibility of the aftermath. Moving forward, most disasters manifest themselves as sudden catastrophic catastrophic events. Although devastating by nature, their period of intensity is short, many disasters are with a metamorphose into chronic events affecting communities over months and some cases years and decades as is the case in Bhopal. Chronic disasters by their very nature demand a wide range of expertise over and beyond the contingent. One such might be called conceptual expertise, the kind needed to devise long term rehabilitation strategies and to troubleshoot them in practice. By the first anniversary of the gas disaster in Bhopal, the state administration amounted public pressure to launch an effective rehabilitation program in the context of which the disaster refused to go away as it might have in the case of a flash flood or a cyclone. In a bento address this pressing problem into cope with the public relations crisis, the government proposed a rehabilitation strategy that in a sense can combine standard regional development programs already underway elsewhere in the state. These schemes however had been conceived of in the absence of adequate socioeconomic and other relevant data on the survivors and without systematic feasibility studies. Unpredictably they failed right from the outset and they've continued their successor programs have in the last three decades. Unlike the case of contingent expertise, the problem of the absence of conceptual expertise needs to be addressed with much more than rehearsed responses. To begin with, it demands a dynamic and pragmatic approach to governance, especially one that builds institutions that expand the role of government from beyond traditional domains of preserving law and order and collecting taxes. Efecting such types of governance in turn demands investment in a wide range of training among other things civil officials. But perhaps more important, the absence of conceptual expertise in Bhopal points to the need to augment the capacity of social scientific and policy institutions. Unlike the case of natural scientific and technological institutions in India, social science in India has suffered from both the absence of a defined mission as well as poor funding. As a result, there's been very little systematic investment in building the kinds of conceptual expertise needed to address the complex problems such as post-disaster rehabilitation. The third category of missing expertise might be described best as ethnographic. It refers to an ability to gain a contextual and grounded understanding and act on the basis of such experience. In Bhopal, for example, the existence of ethnographic expertise could have engendered a radical redesign compensation claims process. Attention to small details and titrating the demands of legal proof or the quantum of suffering of the common people could alter the life world's victims in tangibly positive ways. Unlike contingent and conceptual forms of expertise, which is issues of contention, do periodically enter the public and political arena, ethnographic expertise is rarely made it to the pantheon or what is considered a criteria of good governance. However, translating the idea of ethnographic expertise into an explicit set of practices requires the development of novel innovations and iterative experimental alliances between social scientists and bureaucracies. This remains a challenge, not only in India but elsewhere. Yet another problem in Bhopal is the inability of the rehabilitation enterprise, such as it was in the early years, to integrate different theoretical and evidentiary schemes streams introduced pragmatic solutions. This is particularly evident in the public health domain where officials are unable to understand ideological and systemic complexity and unable to work through the gaps between scientific perspectives from different disciplines such as pathology and internal medicine and different scales from the cellular to the embryonic. This absence of integrative expertise is by no means restricted to Bhopal, it is one of the fundamental problems with the entire risk paradigm. It struggles with interactive complexity and iterative response curves in the context of environmental variability among other things. Last but by no means least is the absence of what might call democratic expertise. In India, as indeed in many other countries with technocracies of range, there is a cultural gap between experts who make policy of bureaucracies and lay peoples who have to live the consequences of these policies. In Bhopal, at a very simple level, this is about a siting decision made by bureaucrats and other officials without consultation. More broadly, where such gaps involve a lack of understanding by experts of local ecologies and adaptive processes developed historically by communities, significant problems of credibility arise. There is a lack of interagency, interregion, international collaborations and interactions that are legion across systems, little coordination and sharing of data, little synchronization of events and little comprehension of processes within institutions, even within a state, leave alone a country. Worse, technocratic decision makers are not even aware of the success stories around the world in which conscious attempts at understanding local communities have produced useful synergies, including informal data streams that complement, improve and problematize official data and in some cases produce better designed systems. It can be countered that India has come a long way since Bhopal, after all the national disaster management authorities now have been running, and crores of rupees have been spent on technological infrastructures from satellite systems of flood sensors and rivers. These are indeed significant developments and have already shown their metal in adequately predicting the uncertain intensity of chronic natural disasters such as cyclones. However, the NDMA, the National Disaster Management Authority, and other agencies have a crucial flaw. They lack adequate social science perspectives. Run largely by scientists and engineers with an agency mindset. They neither have the expertise nor the capacity to understand the vulnerability cannot be addressed only by technical fixes and that they require more systematic historical understanding. Not to speak of analytical capacities. 30 years after Bhopal, there has been considerable progress in understanding the causes of disasters and the means to address them. From alternatives to the rest paradigm, to clean chemistry, to sophisticated understanding of complex systems and high reliability organizations, and reflexive governance, the pieces of what can make a modern world safer are there now. For the most part, this understanding has come from the quiet work of scores of scholars and others who were desperately and deeply shaken by the events of December 1984. However, none of the scholarship and understanding has been integrated. There are few training programs, virtually no master's degree at any level, that bring all this work together and train new generations of practitioners. The upshot is that institution-based building based on anticipation, which is key to effective and good governance, is thwarted by the absence of a cadre of expertise that is capable of reflexive and analytical work. Bhopal, however, urgently calls for a discipline that emphasizes studies of processes that engender foresight, precaution, engagement and integration, and how to create frameworks and dialogic spaces in which reflexivity can occur. Now, it might seem boring and quintessentially academic for me to suggest here on the 30th anniversary of an iconic disaster that our response must be to build new academic programs, banal management authorities, dedicated to disasters. I understand, but I insist. I understand that the poetics of this event of the 30th anniversary of Bhopal does demand our attention to the profundities such as the evils of corporate greed and globalization, and indeed, as many scholars do, studies of governmentality. My humble argument is that the tangible needs of the here and the now of governing well being having foresight and precaution, helping society's scope, also requires complementary approaches. One might call this, under the rubric, the banality of good. My fellow academics, let us build this together. Thank you. Thank you, Ravi, for a very thought-provoking talk there. Our third speaker, our third and final speaker, is Tim Edwards, who is managing trustee of the Bhopal Medical Appeal and spokes for person for the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, which is a coalition of Bhopal survivor groups. He's authored numerous articles on all aspects of the Bhopal disaster and its legal fallout, and I'll hand over to him now, as I'll ask him. Thank you. It's truly a privilege to share a platform with Ravi and Vandana tonight and to have the opportunity to speak with you all. Thank you very much for coming. I wanted to say that Bhopal is something which has many dimensions, and almost all of them seem to be examples of extremity of huge happenings. As Vandana pointed out, Bhopal is an issue of international world importance, and my argument is that it very much continues to be and continues to be an issue that is urgent for all of us to address. So the examples of the extremity of Bhopal might refer to the extreme toxicity of the chemical that people were exposed to 30 years ago in December 1984, the vast quantities in which it was stored in Bhopal, the size of the communities that lived within a mile or two of the tanks that held those chemicals, the numbers of people killed, the mind-boggling numbers that are incomprehensible, really, to the mind, to take hold of, killed both immediately and over the last three decades, the multi-systemic nature of the injuries that were suffered as a result of exposure, leading to a variety of progressive and unending health problems for hundreds of thousands of people, the health damage stretching over multiple generations with no sense of where it will all end, the colossal scale of the multinational deemed to be responsible, the length of time over which issues of civil, criminal and environmental responsibility have and are being fought out in courts of law and also in the streets where the campaigns operate. And because these are all extreme dimensions, they seem to be subject to isolation, they seem to be the product of some sort of exceptionalism. And in wearing this t-shirt, I suppose I'm posing an argument that the exceptionalism, the sense of exceptionalism of Bhopal is in itself misleading, and that actually Bhopal was a product of systemic forces and pressures, not of exceptional or accidental causes. These same forces are today instrumental in the continuing denial of the effected of Bhopal, of the right to have rights, of the rights to health, of a healthy environment, of restitution, and of some kind of reconciliation for those who've been violated, first by Union Carbide and now by Dow Chemical. So, to summarise, we all live in Bhopal because we all live in a world as Vandana articulated so clearly in which corporations design economic policies, corporations ravage the environment, make or break governments and subsequently operate with impunity, and that means that we are all potential or actual victims of corporate negligence and wrongdoing. We all also live in a world in 2004, the United Nations produced a report on the state of the world in respect of toxins and chemicals and chemical production, and they found that in 2004 alone, the only time in which there has been a coalescing of data by the WHO, they found that in that year alone, four and a half million deaths worldwide were attributable to chemical exposure. In that one year, that was more than the total number of deaths attributable to AIDS in 2004. So we all live in a world in which tens of millions of tons of toxic chemicals are being released into the environment in ever growing volumes, chemicals that accumulate in animals and people and are linked with cancers and developmental disorders. Slow and silent Bhopals are happening now in our communities, our workplaces, our bodies and those of our children. Finally, we all live in Bhopal because we all live in a world in which the deaths of 25,000 people and rising and the maeming of half a million, more by private enterprise, so far, remain unremedied and unpunished. And I'll return at the end to the so far part of that statement. I'd like to just remind everybody about what we're all talking about here, what happened 30 years ago. The world's worst industrial disaster began at a Union Carbide's pesticide plant in Bhopal on the evening of December 2, 1984, when a large amount of water and contaminants mixed with over 40 tonnes of the highly reactive, volatile and toxic chemical methylisocyanate, a chemical that was 500 times more dangerous by weight than hydrogen cyanide, the toxin used in Zyklon B during the Holocaust. Shortly after midnight, December 3, approximately 27 tonnes of MIC now in gaseous form, another reaction products jetted out from the top of a high smoke stack, spread out. All six safety systems at the plant were either under designed or malfunctioning or taken out of commission on that night. The gas spread out and drifted down close to the ground in a dense cloud that was carried by prevailing winds straight into the heart of Bhopal City, most of which was less than a mile from the factory. Gas survivor and justice campaigner Rashida B, who you see in the photo behind in the middle of the frame, described the night of terror. Everyone was running all over the place, shouting, run away, we will all die. When we reached Polk to Bridge, our eyes had gotten swollen and we had so much trouble in our lungs that it felt as if someone had lit a fire in our body. Our eyes started to black out and we found it very hard to breathe. We could hear voices around us saying, oh God, please grant us death. That day death appeared desirable. Evidence published by Amnesty International 10 years ago suggests that over the next 72 hours at least 8,000 to 10,000 people died immediately, with children and the elderly suffering the most. The chief cause of immediate death was pulmonary edema whereby victims were drowned by fluid produced in their own lungs. By the time the gas had dispersed, over 573,000 people had been exposed. Local emergency services were entirely overwhelmed. Over the course of the first day, 20,000 people were treated in the 1,000 bed Hermedia Hospital alone. The inundation led to corpses of the dead being stacked one on top of another like there were bags of wheat. According to subsequent medical research, higher elevated rates of morbidity and mortality continue in the affected communities to this day, almost three decades later. There's a long-term prevalence of eye problems for respiratory illnesses. MIC also entered the bloodstream causing multi-systemic injuries to organs within the body. Chromosomal aberrations have been discovered leading to the expectation of cancers and the possibility of birth defects. Gynaecological disorders such as uterine bleeding have been observed along with high levels of reproductive disorders. Neurological and neuromuscular effects such as body aches, tingling in the limbs, dizziness and loss of motor control are common symptoms of gas exposure to this day. Evidence of second-generational effects is now firmly established. It's estimated that almost 50% of those who lived through that night in Bhopal are also suffering from mental health problems, quite understandably. Attempts to provide effective or meaningful remedies for this unprecedented abuse of essential human rights have now met a battery of obstacles. In particular, the main obstacle has been an absence or a lack of access to justice for those affected communities. The obstacles could be grouped into four categories, the essential obstacles. Number one, corporate complexity, which Van Denne alluded to earlier. The ability of corporations to restructure themselves in such a way that one part of the corporation can be separated from another part and designated to be an independent entity, its own business. Number two, the problem of jurisdiction. Multinational corporations have the ability to play legal jurisdictions in different countries off against each other. Union, Carbide and Dow have done this masterfully in the case of Bhopal. Number three, lack of access to information. Corporations have many methods and manners in which they are able to protect information that is critical to a determination of fault to getting behind the causes of an issue. And number four, the complicity and collusion between states and corporations. As a result of these obstacles, the last Union Carbide officials to see the inside of a jail were released 12 days after the gas disaster in 1984. Not a single Union Carbide official has seen the inside of a jail since. Also, the civil settlement which was reached out of court between the Union Government and Union Carbide Corporation in 1989 was utterly inadequate to meet the colossal nature of the need. On average, survivors have received $500 each for lifetime injuries and families of the dead fared little better. Corpses were valued at $2,000 each. Even if the gas disaster hadn't happened in Bhopal, there would have been an environmental disaster, the seeds of which were put in place 12 years before the gas leaked. Thousands of tonnes of toxic waste during that time were buried systematically in online pits around the grounds of the factory and a system of waste collection in a group of ponds outside of the plant were also subject to abuse. They were meant to be reconstructed every year and were only ever constructed once. Compromise cost cutting was imposed on that waste disposal system which meant that the company had already anticipated leakage from those pools of highly toxic materials and that was back 40 years ago. As a result of that negligence, 50,000 people have been regularly exposed to carcinogenic and mutagenic toxins in their water supplies since the 1980s in Bhopal. All of this is profoundly depressing in many ways, so I wanted to return to the so far part of my earlier statement because despite three decades worth of legal travesties, dirty politics and gross miscarriages of justice in various forums, Bhopal survivors have maintained an unbending determination to obtain remedies and restitution via both legal processes and other facets of campaign work. The legal fight has been accompanied by campaigning on an epic scale, you could say. There have been literally hundreds of demonstrations and direct actions over the last 30 years, many of them led by the ladies you see behind me who have been at the forefront of the struggle for justice over this time. Those hundreds of protests have been accompanied by approximately two dozen hunger strikes where people have literally put their bodies on the line to obtain small victories in this long chain of small and larger struggles. The campaign is truly an inspiration. As a result of these struggles, Union Carbide and Dow Chemical still face criminal charges this day. Last month Dow Chemical was supposed to turn up in court to face charges of culpable homicide in Bhopal itself, but they didn't deign to appear on that day. They will have to appear next year, otherwise their assets in India will be subject to potentially punitive sanctions by the courts. Just last year, fresh environmental claims were filed in the United States against Union Carbide and are currently under appeal. Also, a public interest environmental case filed within the Indian court system in 2004 has been instrumental in preventing Dow Chemical from pursuing a $5 billion strategic investment programme in India. Effectively, Dow has lost its social licence to operate in India as a result of its impunity. There have been other consequences for Dow. We discovered earlier this year that the Bhopal legacy has caused Dow's brand rating to fall 300% in six years, during which time Dow has made it into the top ten corporations targeted by activists globally. Its management continues to try and fight off shareholder and investment actions in this respect, but two shareholder resolutions are going forward and being presented at Dow's 2015 AGM, targeting the company's stance on Bhopal. Beside all of this necessary work for justice, I'm standing here rarely because of the other side of the collective and participatory intervention in the situation in which Bhopal survivors found themselves, and that concerns the grassroots movement to seize control of the health situation that people have faced over the years. As Ravi so richly described, there was the utmost failure of state and national institutions to manage the rehabilitation programme effectively and proactively and rationally, and as a result of this, 20 years ago a group of supporters of the Bhopal survivors got together and placed a single newspaper ad in the British press. That one newspaper ad raised enough money to begin the first Sombavna clinic in Bhopal, which was very much from the grassroots. It was the third attempt to establish a survivor's health centre run by survivors, for survivors in the worst affected communities and run on rational lines. Sombavna in the last 20 years has gone from strength to strength and over that time has treated over 30,000 of the people who are worst affected by Union carbide gases in Bhopal. It's a remarkable story and it's a remarkable centre. The Bhopal Medical Appeal has been the proud supporter of Sombavna from the beginning and we continue to support them going forward. We are also now supporting Chingari Trust, which was set up by Rashida B and Chambadevi Shukla around 10 years ago with money that they received for the Goldman Environmental Prize they were awarded in 2004. Chingari Trust sees 200 children a day from the worst impacted communities. These are children who have been born with congenital deformities and problems and issues, learning difficulties, cerebral palsies, etc. Chingari Trust has over 700 children registered. They are only meeting a fraction of the overall need, but they're doing their best and they're continuing to grow and evolve and doing remarkable work. So this event really I think is a homage to the spirit and fight of these groups and the people I've just been describing. Thank you. Thank you to all of our speakers. If I can just take a moment to talk about some of the themes that came through from all three speakers, we saw that there were issues around the systemic pressures that the same forces that were implicated in Bhopal in the first place are also the same forces implicated in the continuing denial of its effects. We also heard from our speakers about the role and the rising power of corporations and their toxic ideas as Vandana put it and with that comes collusion with states to further corporate interests. We're also reminded that there are intergenerational effects of disasters such as Bhopal and that this is an ongoing struggle. It wasn't a singular event, best captured by we all live in Bhopal, I think. We're reminded of the dangers of globalisation and the need for much better engagement with social science and interdisciplinary bodies of knowledge and expertise, which I think will help us think through the other issues that were raised by all of the speakers around a lack of access to justice. Best captured, I think, by your description of the economic valuation of life and death, that those who survived got $500 and those who died had $2,000. But we're reminded as well, despite all of the negative debates or points that we might discuss, that this is a struggle that's not over and that gains are being made by campaigners and also the very positive and remarkable stories of organisations like the Chingari Trust.