The disaster did not come as a bolt from the blue. Between 1982 and 1984 a local journalist from Bhopal, Rajkumar Keswani, published several stories on safety lapses at the Union Carbide plant. On 26 September 1984, one of Keswani’s articles presciently warned ‘Bhopal [is] sitting on the brink of a volcano’.

Just after midnight as poisonous plumes of smoke wafted through the Indian city of Bhopal four decades ago, Gas Devi was born, gasping for every breath.

Four decades after the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, victims still await justice as the case languishes in a prolonged legal battle with 28 judges and inadequate sentences.

Saroj Bhattacharjee, 81, calls it the “biggest trauma” of his life. The Edmonton man was a maintenance engineer at Union Carbide in Bhopal, India, in 1984, when the toxic gas methyl isocyanate leaked from a storage tank.

Considered the world’s worst industrial incident in modern times, the Bhopal gas tragedy was a chemical accident at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India.