NEW DELHI — More than 25 years after a plume of toxic gas from a U.S.-owned chemical plant wafted over the slumbering city of Bhopal, killing thousands, seven former executives of the company were convicted of negligence on Monday. The men were sentenced to two years in prison and fined 100,000 rupees, or $2,100.
They were the first criminal convictions stemming from the leak at the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, a central Indian city. The leak killed 3,000 people almost instantly, and many thousands more later with the aftereffects of the toxic gas, an ingredient in pesticides the plant produced.
Victims groups and activists, who had sought more serious charges, immediately criticized the verdict. Death by negligence is most frequently used in deaths involving car accidents, they said. It carries a maximum two-year sentence.
Sati Nath Sarangi, an advocate for the victims, characterized the verdict as "the world's worst industrial disaster reduced to a traffic accident."
The defendants were all senior officials of the company at the time of the leak, India's deadliest industrial disaster. The accident took place in the early hours of Dec. 3, 1984, when a poisonous gas called methyl isocyanate leaked in the plant and spread over nearby slums.
The convictions were announced after a bitter quarter-century-long court battle. Initially the defendants were charged with culpable homicide, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years, but India's Supreme Court reduced the charges.
Indian authorities tried unsuccessfully to prosecute Warren M. Anderson, chairman of Union Carbide at the time of the leak. Anderson, now approaching 90, came to India after the disaster and was briefly arrested, then released on bail.
Keshub Mahindra, an Indian industrialist who was then chairman of Union Carbide India, was also convicted, along with other Indian officials at the plant. One of the defendants is dead.
Activists and gas victims swarmed to the courtroom to hear the judgment. Hameeda Bi, whose granddaughter died 20 days after the gas leak, said the sentence was much too light.
"The convicts should be given life sentence," Bi said. "They killed thousands of people, and we fought for justice for 25 years."
About 2,000 more deaths were directly attributed to the gas leak, and government records indicate that 578,000 people were affected. Union Carbide paid $470 million to settle with the victims, with each getting an average of $550.
The accident site, which sits in the middle of Bhopal, was given back to the state government. It still has 425 tons of hazardous waste that have yet to be cleared. Union Carbide was bought by Dow Chemical Co. in 2001, and the Indian government is seeking to get Dow to clean up the site. Disease and disfigurements remain common in Bhopal, though little research has been done on the toxic legacy of the accident site.
The Bhopal case has taken on new significance in recent months as India's Parliament has been debating a law capping liability for foreign nuclear power companies operating in India. The law is essential to the civil nuclear technology agreement between India and the United States that brought India into the nuclear mainstream despite its refusal to sign on to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The law would cap foreign companies' liability at little more than $100 million in the event of a disaster.
Abdul Jabbar, an activist who survived the gas leak, said the sentence would encourage corporate impunity.
"This judgment will not have any deterring impact on big companies," he said. "In fact, it will tell them that you can get out of it so easily."