Bhopal: The Settlement, the Review and the Curative Petition

In one line

A settlement of 470 million dollars in 1989, upheld in 1991 with the criminal cases restored, and a curative petition dismissed in 2023 because finality mattered more.

In exam wording: the Bhopal gas leak of December 1984 produced the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act 1985, under which the Union of India took over the claims; a settlement recorded by the Supreme Court in February 1989 under which Union Carbide Corporation paid 470 million United States dollars and the criminal proceedings were quashed; a review decision in Union Carbide Corporation v. Union of India, AIR 1992 SC 248, which upheld the settlement but restored the criminal proceedings and declared that the Union as a welfare State must make good any shortfall; and the dismissal of the Union's curative petitions on 14 March 2023.

The disaster and the statute

December 1984. Methyl isocyanate escaped from the Union Carbide India Limited plant at Bhopal. The dead and the injured were counted in figures that have been disputed ever since and were, on any view, in the thousands and the hundreds of thousands respectively.

The Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act 1985. Parliament's answer was to take the litigation away from the victims. The Act made the Union of India the exclusive representative of every claimant, in India and abroad, on the doctrine of parens patriae.

That single legislative choice explains almost everything that followed. It solved a real problem, since hundreds of thousands of individual claims against a foreign corporation would have taken generations, and it created a new one: the settlement was made by a Government which was not itself injured, on behalf of people who were not heard. Every criticism of the 1989 settlement is at bottom a criticism of that Act.

The 1989 settlement

The terms. Union Carbide Corporation paid 470 million United States dollars in full and final settlement of all past, present and future claims, and all civil and criminal proceedings were quashed.

The objections. That the figure was arrived at without any determination of the number of dead and injured; that the victims were not heard; that a criminal prosecution cannot be bought off; and that the quashing of the criminal cases was beyond the Court's power.

The 1991 review: Union Carbide Corporation v. Union of India

This is the decision to know, and its holdings are separable.

On the civil settlement. The Court held that under Article 142(1) it had jurisdiction to withdraw the suits to itself and dispose of them in terms of the settlement. The settlement was not void for non-compliance with Order XXIII Rule 3B of the Code of Civil Procedure; it was not opposed to public policy; and it did not amount to stifling a prosecution.