Bhopal: 20 Years After

Looking back, Shanti Debi thinks it was the night her husband Kishen Chand went blind that she first saw things clearly. Awakened by her daughter screaming that she was suffocating, Shanti thought she could smell burning chilies. The next moment, everyone was being sick. And right then, Shanti's life, and Bhopal's social fabric, began to disintegrate. "Everybody just rushed out," she says. "Nobody cared about anybody else. I even left my own children. Everybody just cared about saving their own life."

On the night of Dec. 2-3, 1984, Bhopal suffered one of the worst industrial accidents of modern...