Six Years and Counting: Learning from Crisis Management at Bhopal

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to look at the events and actions in the Bhopal crisis and its management in retrospect, and to cull out lessons that might be learned for the future. The authors investigate where Union Carbide stands today and from it identify possible criteria which may be used to evaluate the effectiveness of crisis management in general. They outline some of the major events and issues during the crisis at Bhopal as they evolved, and comment on some of the actions taken by Carbide to respond to them. Based on this, they develop some general propositions regarding crisis management.