Bhopal: Where The Dead Still Walk On Earth

THIS famous, terrible & tender picture was taken by magnum photographer Raghu Rai on the morning after the night of horror in Bhopal, on December 3, 1984, when a huge cloud of poison 500 times more toxic than cyanide spewed from a factory belonging to Union Carbide Corporation.

Thousands died in the most hideous ways. As the sun rose on streets full of corpses, Raghu found himself in a stony graveyard where a man was burying his young daughter. The father had covered the tiny body but then, unable to bear parting from her, brushed the earth away for one last look.

For the Bhopalis this picture has come to symbolise twenty-one
years of unimaginable suffering, an injustice that has never been righted,
crimes that continue to go unpunished, and a community that most of the world has forgotten.

Today in Bhopal, well over 100,000 people are still chronically sick from the effects of that night, while some 20,000 others are suffering from illnesses caused by contamination of their wells and stand-pipes
by chemicals leaking from the abandoned plant, which to this day remains derelict and full of poisons. Union Carbide and its owner Dow Chemical continue to deny responsibility for the water poisoning and refuse to clean up the factory.

Years after, while those who died look for justice and those are still alive look for a way to live, Bhopal is a city which may not sleep till a long long time.

Find out what you can do, for those who manage to live and those who died a silent and painful death here.