People were collecting the mercury in their lunch boxes, cooking pots and any other containers that could be found. Entire families, from grandparents to small children spent days scraping mercury from the semi-solid muck of the dump. They ate their food on the site, their babies played on the site. The Gujarat Alkalis and Chemicals Ltd, a state-owned company producing caustic soda, has been blamed for the dumping. According to newspapers, they had dumped 20 truckloads of the liquid waste containing the mercury at the site.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
William Pitt the Younger.