Villagers burn down chemical company site

Mumbai: About 100 people worried about industrial pollution set fire to a construction site of a local unit of Dow Chemical Co in western India on Friday, police and a Dow official said. The company is setting up a research and development centre with an initial investment of 4 billion rupees (Dh330 million) near Shinde village, about 200 kilometres from Mumbai. Dow Chemical Co is the largest US chemical maker. For many Indians, Dow is synonymous with the catastrophic industrial accident in Bhopal in central India in 1984, when tonnes of toxic gas leaked from a pesticide plant owned at the time by Union Carbide. Nearly 3,800 people died soon after exposure to the gas, while tens of thousands more people were made sick. Union Carbide later became a subsidiary of Dow. There is still argument over who should clean up the site,... [read full story]