Crime and Punishment

After 26 years of painful wait, the final verdict has been delivered this year for the Bhopal Gas Tragedy case. And what was the verdict? Only 8 convicted for a maximum of 2 years in jail, for which they were granted bail immediately. And this is for the gross negligence and greed which caused thousands on deaths, tens of thousands of injuries and birth defects. Till date, children are born in Bhopal with birth defects which can very well be attributed to the leak of leathal mythyle isocyanate gas in that cursed night of 1984.

This is a case of Justice delayed AND Justice denied.

Poinsionous mythyle isocyanate gas leaked at midnight from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal and killed thousands in their sleep. But they were perhaps the fortunate ones; thousands of others suffred months, even years of sickness; were paralysed to various extents, lost eyesights, developed cancers and waited for a slow, painful death.

While their losses were incompensateable, at least they could still have some consolence if the people responsible were brought to justice. But after long and tedious judicial process which lasted for over 25 years involving numerous trials, wittnesses and cross examinations, they were finally told that no one was practically responsible for their peril.

Their own government simply cheated them. Indian government took the case from victims' hands and claimed to represent the case in their behalf. And then went for an out of court settlement with the Union Carbide and agreed for a peanuts amount of settlement money ($470 million). With this money, Union Carbide (and their present taker Dow Jones) washed their hands off the whole episode; they were free of all criminal and civil liabilities regarding this case.

The central government investigating agency did not furnish the required proofs; the Indian government did not excersise its extradiation treaty with America to bring Union Carbide chairman to Inida to face the trial. And America did not bother to try him in its own judicial system either; who cares, if a few thousands poor Indians die thousands of miles away? That's no reason to bother an wealthy American businessman!

Of course it is a different matter if the disaster happens in American soil affecting American people. Just look what happened when the oil leaked from BP well in gulf of Mexico. BP top bosses were grilled in Senate, made to set aside a compensation pot of 2 billion dollars and had to spend billions more to seal the leak. This was the penalty for causing 11 deaths and putting a few thousands out of business for one season, endangering wild lives and making the American coast dirty.


Yes, the environmental impact of the BP oil leak is enormous, but so it was for the Bhopal gas leak. If the formar is worst environmental disaster for America then the later is that for the whole world.

I'm not advocating for the less severe penalty for BP; they deserve every bit of it and should be punished even more,if possible, for their negligence. American government did a very good job dealing with the situation....making sure that the leak is stopped as soon as possible and that everybody concerned gets compensated.

Bhopal tragedy survivors are not so lucky; their own government betrayed them and the all powerful America, including their Nobel peace prize winner president, could not care less. They are simply not interetsed in brining one of their welthy citizens to trial to provide justice to a bunch of poor, black people in another continent.

The two incidents just show that the value of human life is not same for everybody. The punishments for these two similar crimes are anything but similar or compareable. This could be against the basic rule of justice; but then life is anything but "just".

Pseudoscience

In the last couple of months, a number of articles have been published in both electronic and print media, regarding the  statictics of cyclists' death in London last year.

No, they were not blaming the London traffic, the Bendy buses or the reckless drivers; Instead they were pointing out to the fact that out of 13 cyclists died in road accidents last year, 10 were women. The articles expressed their surprise to this "disproportionately high" percentage of women cyclists involved in the fatal accidents and some also tried to find out the possible reasons behind it.

Comments poured in from the readers with hundereds of different explanations. While some took no time to dismiss women and their ability to ride cycle and promptly extended their verdict to general uselessness of women, others were very patronising; poor women,the weak and less clever things; it is not fair to compare them with the strong, bold, clever, agile men. This is only to be expected.

One clever comment even went on to explain it from the genetic evolution (his own version, of course); As men had to hunt (and women apparently stayed peacefully in comfy caves, looking after the children, preparing meals and watching cave-soaps in prehistoric telly, perhaps), they are genetically more evolved to scan the surrounding better than women. And this fantastic skill helps them to watch out for the big lorries while cycling in narrow London roads; but women get easily perished under those big wheels due to their lack of "surroundings scanning gene".

 What a beautiful piece of armchair science without any need for proper understanding of the subject or the experimental data! If born in ancient Greece, this man could give stiff competition to Aristotle, who proclaimed women have fewer teeth than men, without bothering to count.

It is truly amazing how so many people just overlooked the sample size. The first thing that should strike anybody is the fact that you can not have a statistics with just 13 data points.The accuracy of any statistical probability depends largely on the sample size; the more data points you have the more accurate is your result.The error in statistical probability is approximately √n, where n is the sample size.

No one would have objected, if 50% of the accidents were involving women, which is 6.5 in this case. But for a sample size of 13, the error is about 3.61. Add this two together (6.5+3.6) and you get 10.1, the number factoring in the error bar. Still a tad more than the actual number of women died. So much for the "disproportionately high" number of women involved in fatal crash.

This is the precise reason why the actual statisticians do not operate with a sample size of 13 while dealing with a population size of London. The error bar here is comparable to the sample size and no one can infer anything from this; no one other than an ignorant, sexist, bigot, hell bent on believing in the male superiority.

The kind of coverage this story got in major mainstream news papers (Guardian, BBC, to name a few) only shows the deep rooted gender bias in the society; You just need to scratch the surface and the eternal male ego will be inflated eclipsing all reasons and facts.

What makes this even more appalling is the use of pseudoscience to make this chauvinistic claim look convincing.Some articles went as far as proclaiming that women cyclists in London are at "considerably greater risk". All based on their sample size of 13 and yet they have not been charged for rumor spreading and scare mongering.

I tossed a coin 3 times  the other day and I got tail in each occasion. Do I see another sensational heading?
 "Always get tail in a toss in Stockholm". Which might open a floodgate of pseudoscientific speculations... proximity to north pole, magnetic effect of earth, effects of aurora borealis & solar wind,long hours of day light, metallic composition of Swedish Krona.....the possibilities are endless.