'Delhi has stripped a flagship nuclear bill of a clause that allowed companies to be sued for negligence in the event of an accident.'
This clause has been added back
cheers
May be Guardian’s heart bleeds for British Petroleum more than for Bhopal Gas Slaughter victims. But the points it has raised are pertinent.
courtesy:
While Barack Obama is lambasting BP for spreading muck in the Gulf of Mexico, he should perhaps pencil in a date with the people of Bhopal when he visits India later this year. While 11 men lost their lives on BP's watch and the shrimps get coated with black stuff, the chemicals that killed thousands of people in Bhopal in 1984 are still leaching into the ground water a quarter of a century after a poisonous, milky-white cloud settled over the city. The compensation – some $470m – paid out by Union Carbide, the US owner of the plant and now part of Dow Chemical, was just the cash it received from its insurers to compensate the victims, a process that took 17 years. But it's one rule for them and another for anybody else.
Obama wants "British Petroleum" to pay back every nickel and dime the Deepwater Horizon disaster costs. To make sure BP gets the message, the president says he back Congress plans to retrospectively raise the liability limit for claims from $75m to $10bn. That's real money. While foreign companies in the US are shown the big stick, Washington offers a big shield for its multinationals abroad. In the case of Bhopal, it was the US that blocked India's requests to extradite Warren Anderson, the former chairman of Union Carbide who accepted "moral responsibility" for the accident until a short spell in an Indian jail changed his mind.
This week saw just the prosecution of local Indian managers – 26 years after the event.
Surely today India, which says it is an emerging power that wants to shape the world, would be able to stand up to the United States today?
India's still playing a craven toady to a US that is ruthlessly pursuing an agenda where commercial interests are put above the lives of others. Delhi has stripped a flagship nuclear bill of a clause that allowed companies to be sued for negligence in the event of an accident.
It is bizarre to see a leader of the developing world offer up its citizens' lives cheaply to secure investment from foreign companies and governments. Under the civil liabilities for nuclear damage bill, central to a deal with the controversial nuclear pact with the US, costs for cleaning up a catastrophic failure would end up being paid by the Indian taxpayer.
Sure, India is desperate for the nuclear deal – which will see it become the only nonpermanent member of the UN security council to keep its atomic weapons and trade in nuclear know-how. But at what price? Today we know.
No comments:
Post a Comment