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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.
The story is a night-time industrial release into adjoining wards, not a natural disaster and not a war.
The legal story is a 1985 statute, a 1989 cheque and a 2010 two-year sentence — three endings that do not agree.
Beats
- A tank in a crowded city
UCIL stored MIC at a plant whose neighbours had grown around it. By December 1984 several layers of protection on the MIC system were out of normal service, according to later official and civil records.
- The night of 2–3 December
An uncontrolled release moved with the winter air over nearby settlements. Hospitals filled before dawn. Municipal death registration could not keep a complete night list.
- Anderson’s brief arrest
UCC’s chief executive flew to Bhopal, was arrested and released, and left India. Extradition requests later failed. English headlines made that departure a permanent character note.
- India takes the claims
The 1985 Act displaced individual suits in favour of the Union as parens patriae. United States courts then sent the mass tort home on forum grounds.
- Settlement, reduction, conviction
1989 brought US$470 million. 1996 brought a thinner criminal charge. 2010 brought two-year sentences. The site’s waste stayed on the map.
Bhopal’s story is a known leak and an unfinished assignment of duty among plant, parent, state and successor.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.