NEW DELHI: Two people set themselves on fire in India on Friday to protest against the disposal of hazardous waste from the decades-old Bhopal industrial disaster, local government officials said.

Images on social media showed the two men dousing themselves in liquid before being engulfed in shooting flames, although officials said the men survived.

The protests erupted after authorities moved hundreds of tonnes of hazardous waste—remaining from the world’s deadliest industrial disaster in Bhopal in 1984—to the town of Pithampur for disposal.

“The self-immolation attempt was unfortunate, but both people are safe now,” said Priyank Mishra, the administrative head of Dhar district where Pithampur is located.

A long convoy of trucks with a police escort ferrying the 337 tonnes of waste—sealed inside containers—arrived in Pithampur, Madhya Pradesh state, on Wednesday night.

The waste dates back to the Dec 1984 disaster at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal—when some 3,500 people were killed in the immediate aftermath of a chemical leak, and up to 25,000 are estimated to have died overall.

Twenty-seven tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC), used in the production of pesticides, swept through the city of over two million people after one of the tanks storing the deadly chemical shattered its concrete casing.

Communities have for decades blamed a high level of sickness on the contamination of the groundwater in the wake of the highly toxic gas leak.

The order to clear the waste was made last month and Mishra insisted that its disposal would be done safely.

“The process is being carried out under the aegis of the top scientific institutions of the country,” he said.

“We have already held many public consultations and we will continue to explain to people in even simpler terms that it is a safe exercise.”

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Mohan Singh has also said that trial disposal exercises had showed that there it had “no impact on the environment”.

In Bhopal, testing of groundwater near the site in the past revealed cancer- and birth defect-causing chemicals 50 times higher than what is accepted as safe by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Communities blame a range of health problems, including cerebral palsy, hearing and speech impair­ments and other disabilities, on the accident and the contamination of the groundwater.

Published in Dawn, January 4th, 2025