Richie Mehta, director of the Emmy award-winning series Delhi Crime, is all set to helm a web series based on the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy.
Produced by Ronnie Screwvala’s RSVP Movies and Ramesh Krishnamoorthy’s Global One Studios, the series is based on Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro’s 1997 book, Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster.
Talking about the subject, Mehta said in a press release, “I think the fact that it happened in the 1980s, it is starting to evaporate from the collective consciousness of young people. Many people don’t even know about it or they hear rumours of it in India and certainly internationally. And so I feel like it’s really important to get it out there in an impartial and extremely well-researched manner, which the authors have done.”
Mehta is co-writing the series along with Shaun Mehta, who wrote the screenplay of the former’s debut film Amal.
The web series is likely to consist of six to eight one-hour episodes. Currently, it is in the development stage and production will begin in early 2022. However, no streaming platform has been brought on board yet.
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“We want to develop it on our own because I think if you get into too much consensus view right in the beginning, then it becomes a bit of a challenge,” Screwvala said in the press release. “We want to develop this completely on our own, go with our own conviction and go to somebody who buys into our vision rather than being a mishmash of everyone. Because the minute you get into development funding, it becomes just too many people in the room.”
Bhopal Gas Tragedy, which is known as the world’s worst industrial disaster, happened on the night of December 2, 1984. The chemical methyl isocyanate (MIC) spilled out from Union Carbide India Ltd’s pesticide factory and turned the city of Bhopal into a colossal gas chamber. At least 30 tonnes of methyl isocyanate gas killed more than 15,000 people and affected over 600,000 workers.