The Bhopal gas disaster: focus on community health and environmental effects.

Thomas rightly identifies the serious failings, and the need for improvement, in the state of occupational safety and health in India. He focuses on the ramifications in a variety of workplaces where inadequate or unenforced legal and health protections lead to worker ill health, injury, and even death. The medical and legal professions, workers’ unions, and government departments responsible for workplace safety all need to do more to protect workers. They must build on regulations already in place, exercising vigilance to see that these are enforced. They must not only conduct oversight of traditional factory workplaces, mines, and so forth, but also ensure that regulations appropriate to new types of workplaces, like those producing electronic components for a wide range of devices and technologies, are promulgated in a timely way. Had proper safety standards been in place, we would probably never have had the Bhopal disaster.