The Dow Chemical Company has a problem.

Quite how big a problem it is frankly hadn't occurred to me until a conversation I had a few days ago with a sage of the corporate image-making industry.

"Dow has become the Chinese Torch Relay of this Games," argued said sage.

"It's not going away."

Personally, I'm not sure things have reached quite that stage.

However, it will be interesting to see how many of the mainstream news articles about the company's Olympic sponsorship that appear between now and August do not contain the word "India".

My guess is not many.

The issue, of course, is the way Dow's relatively new status as one of the International Olympic Committee's worldwide – or TOP – sponsors has been used to heap pressure onto the company over the Bhopal toxic gas disaster of 1984.

Michigan-based Dow had nothing to do with that disaster, which killed thousands of people.

But it later acquired the company, Union Carbide, at whose plant the leak occurred.

A great deal of time has passed and Union Carbide settled its liabilities with the Indian Government by paying $470 million (£298 million/€358 million) for Bhopal victims long before the Dow acquisition.

So I don't think Dow has a legal problem, but I do think it has a perceptual one and perhaps a moral one.

Let me just say at this point that, while I have no deep familiarity with the chemicals industry or indeed Bhopal, I have met George Hamilton (pictured), vice president of Dow's Olympic operations, and he struck me as an individual worthy of considerable respect.

I don't believe for one moment Hamilton and his colleagues are bad people, though they are subject to the usual raft of pressures that come with working for a hyper-efficient, publicly-quoted, multibillion dollar corporation.

Dow, you will probably recall, is producing the wrap that will encircle the Olympic Stadium during London 2012.

The perceptual problem, I think, is this: a bunch of predominantly poor families living pretty hard lives had those lives made 10 times harder by the consequences of a leak from an industrial facility owned by a company from the rich, powerful United States of America.

Notwithstanding Union Carbide's $470 million (£298 million/€358 million) payment, the lives of many people in the immediate vicinity remain, as I understand it, extremely hard.

From the momentum gathered by the present anti-Dow campaign, there seems to be a perception that the rich, powerful United States of America could and should do more to improve lives devastated by the leak.

In this context, Dow's understandable stance – that it had nothing to do with the catastrophe – though factually correct, appears to be doing little for its international image.

The moral argument runs like this:

Dow was able to acquire Union Carbide in part because, as the New York Times put it in reporting the deal in August 1999, "Carbide's investors have seen their investment stagnate in recent years".

It seems reasonable to think that this, in turn, was partly explained by the damage to the Union Carbide brand dealt by the Bhopal disaster.

If you accept this, then you could argue that Dow was able to acquire its rival at an attractive price partly because of what had happened in India.


And if you accept that, it does not seem all that much of a leap to argue that a portion of any value created by the deal ought perhaps to have been channelled to the Bhopal victims.

Dow's IOC sponsorship runs until 2020 and if this issue is not to risk undermining other benefits the partnership can undoubtedly deliver, then I think the company seriously needs to consider changing tack.

If it could show it was taking meaningful steps to help improve the lives of those affected by the catastrophe – as a matter of charity not obligation – the dividends to Dow in terms of international goodwill could far outweigh the cost of setting up and funding the initiative.

One possible approach would be for Dow to announce it was setting aside a meaningful sum of money over the balance of its term as a TOP sponsor for projects that would see it work in tandem with grass-roots charities in Bhopal.

Dow should insist that these local partners acknowledge in writing that the company has no legal responsibility for the disaster and stand up in public every once in a while to extol its efforts to help some very underprivileged individuals.

The company could derive further benefit by integrating Bhopal projects in the training programmes of its brightest young managerial prospects, for whom such schemes could act as highly stimulating proving-grounds.

It seems to me very important that assistance provided in this way should go as directly as possible to the victims of the catastrophe.

One hopes the Indian public authorities would recognise this as well and help Dow to ensure that its cash, materials and expertise were deployed as effectively as possible.

With events taking place in Sochi, Nanjing and Rio de Janeiro in the next four years, the Olympics should provide sponsors with an enviable vehicle for pursuing their ambitions in the fast-growing and populous BRIC economies we have heard so much about.

While this may help Dow to accelerate its growth in Brazil, Russia and China, it is hard to see it making any headway in the fourth BRIC – India – until this boil is lanced.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Cup. Owen's Twitter feed can be accessed by clicking here.