M.F. SALDANHA, J.:—After Bhopal and Chernobyl, is it to be the turn of Thane for another man-made disaster of unprecedented dimensions? History is supposed to forewarn and it is said that we are required to learn from our mistakes of the past. What began with the industrial revolution and was politely referred to in economic terms as development has, over the decades and centuries, grown into the setting up of gigantic enterprises which cater to the life-style and requirements of progressing society. While, on the one hand, manufacturing processes necessarily involve the storage and use of products which in themselves can often be categorised as dangerous, many of the processes themselves are required to be conducted under systems of extreme safety. It was realised all the more after the Bhopal tragedy that even the manufacture of pesticides, which have their own use, could, in the event of an accident or leakage, kill a sizable portion of the population in the vicinity of such a plant. The accent in the last decade at least has been focussed more and more towards the preventive aspect which in the simplest of the terms envisages that the danger to health and human life sho