A single official total is 20,000 dead on the night.
The night-time official figure commonly cited is 2,259. Five-figure totals are later attributions or campaign estimates and must be dated.
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Notoriety88
Mystery22
Scale96
Evidence70
Legal impact72
Culture68
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Quick answers
What leaked at Bhopal?
Methyl isocyanate from a storage tank at the UCIL pesticide plant on the night of 2–3 December 1984. The page does not discuss how to handle or release the chemical. The public fact is an uncontrolled urban exposure.
How many people died?
The official immediate death toll often cited is 2,259. Indian government statements later used about 3,500 deaths in the first days and more than 15,000 gas-related deaths over the following years. Campaign estimates run higher. All of these are dated published figures, not a single census.
What was the 1989 settlement?
UCC paid US$470 million to the Union of India under Supreme Court orders of 14–15 February 1989 to resolve civil claims. Criminal proceedings were first quashed and later revived. Distribution of the money to claimants took years and remains criticised.
Who was convicted?
On 7 June 2010 a Bhopal court convicted seven former UCIL officials, including chairman Keshub Mahindra, and the Indian company of causing death by negligence (IPC 304A) and related counts. Sentences were two years and fines. An eighth accused had died. Warren Anderson was not in the dock.
Why is the status “mixed”?
Civil claims were settled; criminal law produced only negligence convictions of Indian employees; the American parent executive was never tried in India; the factory site’s contamination file is not closed. Those outcomes do not add to a single word like convicted or closed.
What Indian laws followed?
The 1985 claims-processing Act, the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 and the Public Liability Insurance Act 1991. Together they centralised claimant representation, environmental rule-making and no-fault industrial insurance.
Mixed means several legal endings, not a mystery about the leak.
English myth still prefers a single death integer and a single villain who can be produced in court.
Still open
- Site remediation — Who must remove remaining waste and treat groundwater is still a live Indian and successor-company argument.
- A dated death total — Night, decade and campaign figures coexist. No later census erased the 2,259 immediate official count.
- Parent and successor duty — Whether UCC or Dow owes more than 1989 is litigated in rhetoric and, periodically, in court.
- Medical follow-up — Chronic illness in exposed wards remains a clinic and research file, not a closed registry.
- Extradition as history — Anderson’s death in 2014 closed a personal docket without closing the principle it stood for.
Myth vs record
No one was ever convicted.
Seven UCIL officials and the Indian company were convicted on 7 June 2010. The sentences were two years under a reduced charge.
The 1989 payment was secretly imposed without a court.
The Supreme Court of India recorded and supervised the settlement, then faced review because criminal cases had been quashed.
The cause of the leak is unknown.
An MIC release from Tank 610 is established. Remaining argument is about water ingress, safeguards and corporate knowledge — not about whether a leak occurred.
Local notes
English news week, 1984
Wires led with poison gas, a death estimate that changed by the hour, and an American executive in an Indian lock-up.
English law memory
US and UK faculties remember forum non conveniens and EPCRA more readily than IPC 304A.
English campaign memory
Amnesty and ICJB English keeps the site photograph in the present; corporate fact-sheets keep 1989 in the past tense.
Bhopal is a known industrial release whose legal endings do not line up — the definition of mixed.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.