Account of interview with N. Ganesh, a PhD researcher at the Jawaharlal Nehru Cancer Hospital in Bhopal. The interview was conducted by Tim Edwards of the UK Campaign for Justice in Bhopal. This report first published on bhopal.org in December 2002.

When I visited the Jawarlhal Nehru Cancer hospital for the first time in April 2001, it was at the behest of N Ganesh, a medical researcher working on the final stages of his PhD. Andy Moxon, a photographer I was working with in Bhopal, had met Ganesh on the Punjab Mail during a journey from Bombay to Bhopal. Ganesh told Andy that he was undertaking research on the long term genetic effects of MIC exposure, and had invited the two of us to see some of his work.

The JNCH appears impressively up to date, with clean cool corridors, broad, well-aired wards and state of the art equipment. Ganesh's lab was exceedingly well equipped, almost cluttered with contemporary medical laboratory equipment. Racks of test tubes on the benches, a large refrigerator, charts on the walls, a machine utilising centrifugal force to separate blood cells, medical posters, and, in pride of place, an electron microscope. Ganesh seemed pleased to be able to show us around his working environment, but he also seemed a little jumpy, especially so when footsteps passed in the corridor outside.

The name of Ganesh's project was "Genetic risk evaluation of MIC - clinical and cyto-immunological studies in population exposed in Bhopal". He explained that the subjects of the photos he was about to show us were born to parents heavily exposed to MIC. They were all from areas close to the factory. The cases had come to light in government hospitals over the previous few years, and Ganesh had had exclusive access to them.
He had mapped out diagrams of the family history of each subject. There were photographs of chromosomes attached to each of these case files, and Ganesh pointed out ominous breaks and abnormalities within the material. We were then shown about 30 photos - taken from 2000 onwards - of young children born within gas exposed families. The images revealed birth deformities, the majority of them so monstrous, so disturbing that I kept revisiting them in my mind's eye for weeks after. The first photographs – amateurly shot, with a garish fullness to the colour – presented a sequence of retinoblastinomas, a type of cancer that rages just behind the eye socket of its host, making the eye horrifically swollen, misshapen and bounded with livid tissue. None of the children affected were older than six years old. In some of the photos, with one half of the face being unmarked, there was a jolting bifurcation between monster and ordinary child. In others the deformity wrought by the cancer tugged upon already imperfect features. In one photo a baby months old was hidden behind two of these grotesque afflictions.

There was no restraint in the horror of these images. Next there were genital distortions, followed by gross limb deformities (one girl held up a foot five times larger than the one on which she stood - another flexed fingers that protruded from her shoulders), and tiny babies with hyenchephalitis, whereby the skull swells and bloats, throwing the body out of proportion and squashing down the features. Finally there was a boy with doughy skin, lying in what looked like an incubator, looking past the camera through a large, single, milky eye situated near the middle of his forehead. It was a relief when the photos ended. Ganesh said that he didn't have the resources to collect more case studies but he knew that there were many more out there. Apparently the director of the hospital wasn't giving Ganesh much support on his project. Not only that, he didn't really want outsiders to know about Ganesh's research.

I asked Ganesh if, in his opinion, the congenital abnormalities had resulted from gas exposure. 'Certainly', he said. 'But what I have is not enough to publish the data.'

I thought about the sparseness of the known research on the matter. An Indian Council of Medical Research study from the 1980's found that 15 in 1000 babies born after the gas showed congenital malformations. In a study ranging one to ten kilometres from the Carbide factory, 12 months after exposure 71% of the exposed population showed evidence of chromosomal damage compared with 21% in a control population. Breaks and gaps were also found in the chromosomes of exposed people three years after the gas. After that, no systematic research had been published.

As we came out of the lab and I asked Ganesh more questions, he seemed to get more nervous. It wouldn't look good if the director knew that he had brought us in here. We moved off to talk to people in the hospital's MIC wards, which were funded by a Rs 1 crore grant from the Department of Gas Relief and Rehabilitation. But the Director quickly did find out we were there, and summoned my colleague Andy into his office for a half-hour dressing down. Andy said nothing about Ganesh or the photos we had seen. We were asked to leave the hospital.

A few weeks later I took an ABC Nightline film maker to meet Ganesh at a neutral location: the museum of Hamidia hospital where, amongst other gruesome exhibits, there were several malformed foetuses kept in jars in formaldehyde. One of them, blue in colour, looked scarcely human; the rear of its skull was small and squared off, whereas its frontal lobes were exaggerated and prominent. Ganesh told us that it was a gas baby.
I asked Ganesh to tell the reporter what he had told me earlier. He didn't, instead talking generally about cancers, case studies that were not MIC related. Every time we tried to bring Ganesh back to the birth defects, back to the subject of MIC related health consequences, he would make increasingly nervous and erratic statements that led us away from the topic. I got the sense of a man deeply afraid for his job.

My suspicion, from these encounters and other stories I had already heard, was that information pointing to the serious long-term consequences of MIC exposure was being systematically suppressed by local officials. It was not so many years back that national officials were implicated in the same business, when the programme of ICMR studies were inexplicably shelved, many unfinished, and a ban placed on their publication by the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilisers. The ban was lifted in 1996, silently, but the studies have yet to receive the benefit of public scrutiny.

Before leaving Bhopal I met Dr Ghazala, a paediatrician at Hamidia hospital, gas-affected herself and with an active concern for the welfare of Bhopal's survivors. Her comments were unequivocal: "The government doctors won't say a word about gas problems. They are under orders not to talk about these things. If they talk to the press they will say there are no problems."

The muddying of information on the condition of gas survivors by Indian authorities seems to have quite a history. The settlement of $470 million, struck behind closed doors with representatives of Union Carbide, was based upon grossly under-calculated figures for the dead and maimed, figures that are still quoted as fact by the company and by careless journalists. The phenomena only throws up questions and more questions. Why would a government so greatly weaken its own position in a settlement dispute? Why would it prevent medical information on the gas being publicly available, information that could benefit the efforts of physicians working with the aftermath of gas poisoning? Why indeed, even 18 years later, was there an official climate of secrecy and cover-ups concerning what a foreign company had done to the very people that the same officials are assigned to represent and protect?

(Source: Tim Edwards, interviewed by Bhopal.Org, December 2002)