While skimming through today’s Hindustan Times I saw a headline saying that Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) bans Dow Chemicals from their recruiters list. I didn’t have the heart to go further. Here a link to the story from some other news-channel.

Why ? Not because I don’t believe that Dow Chemicals was responsible for the tragedy, nor for the abject handling of the victims. But because it was not only the Dow Chemicals who was responsible.

If we follow the line of logic used in banning the Dow Chemicals, we should also ban the approval of government on the degrees of IIT’s. We should never forget who was the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh at the time when Dow Chemicals was allowed to set up an hazardous-gas producing plant in the heart of city, circumventing the necessary safety measures making it too lucrative a deal for Dow Chemicals to be missed. I don’t know how many hands were greased but can only speculate that Indian bureaucracy would not have missed such a golden offer.
That Chief Minister is now the Human Resource Development minister. I even considered changing my name after coming to know his name, but the red-tapeism brought me back to the reality.

Indians have always taken themselves to be too cheap when it comes to be cost of their lives or their compatriot’s May be that is the reason we did nothing except crying over the lost souls. We never tried to pressurize USA to extradite the CEO of Dow Chemicals who is still living luxuriously without any fear in USA. We never really tried to ask our ‘noble’ politicians who sacrifice their life in serving the people that how Dow Chemicals was allowed to make a plant without necessary safety measures which it had installed in its USA plant.
Of course now when India is ‘poised’ to become superpower it can wear the cloak of this moral-attitude, but again it will be only the IITians who will be at a loss as not getting a chance to work in a company with all the ’state of art’ equipments.