NEW YORK — Union Carbide Corp. agreed Tuesday to pay $470 million in compensation to victims of the 1984 pesticide leak from its plant in Bhopal, India, that killed 3,330 people and ranks as history's worst industrial disaster.
The chemical company will pay the sum to the Indian government in a settlement directed by the Indian Supreme Court and ending four years of legal wrangling in the United States and India. A special Indian tribunal will divide the payment among about 500,000 claimants, a task that is expected to take years.
The settlement, hailed as equitable both by the company and the Indian government, ends all civil and criminal charges against Union Carbide and its executives.
'Eminently Fit'
Indian Supreme Court Chief Justice R. S. Pathak, who had pressed Union Carbide and the Indian government to come to terms, said the lump-sum payment proposal is "eminently fit for an overall settlement in view of the acute suffering of the victims."
The agreement was announced as oral arguments were about to resume before the five-judge Indian Supreme Court on pretrial issues.
A spokesman for an American advocacy group, the Bhopal Action Resource Center, said the settlement was "ludicrously low," recalling that the Indian government had originally sued for $3.3 billion. David Dembo, a spokesman for the group, said that the lack of a trial also means that it may never be determined whether the leak was caused by employee sabotage, as Union Carbide claimed, or as a result of poor plant design, as the Indian government has insisted.
On Dec. 3, 1984, shortly after midnight, a chemical reaction produced a cloud of poisonous methyl isocyanate gas that suffocated hundreds of people in a nearby shantytown, then drifted over other sections of the populous central Indian city. More than 2,000 of the victims died almost immediately.
The accident had widespread and lasting consequences.
Deaths Every Day
Thousands of victims remain disabled in hospitals and clinics near the closed plant, many blind and others with badly scarred lungs. Hundreds have died in the years since the disaster. Victims continue to die at a rate of about one a day, according to the Indian government.
Other victims and sympathizers have held angry demonstrations over the past four years to protest what they saw as the slow progress toward a settlement.
