Executives of Union Carbide India Ltd., which operated the plant, are reluctant to address the question of responsibility for the tragedy, in which about 200,000 people were injured. The plant's manager has declined to discuss the irregularities. The managing director of the Indian company refused to talk about details of the accident or the conditions that produced it, although he did say that the enforcement of safety regulations was the responsibility of executives at the Bhopal plant.

When questioned in recent days about the shortcomings disclosed in the inquiry by The Times, a spokesman at Union Carbide corporate headquarters in Danbury characterized any suggestion of the accident's causes as speculation and emphasized that Union Carbide would not ''contribute'' to that speculation.

(Articles describing the corporation's relationship with its Indian affiliate and its comments on the accident at Bhopal appear on page A7.)

Summary of Irregularities

A review by The Times of some company documents and interviews with chemical experts, plant workers, company officials and former officials disclosed these and other irregularities at Bhopal:

- When employees discovered the initial leak of methyl isocyanate at 11:30 P.M. on Dec. 2, a supervisor - believing, he said later, that it was a water leak - decided to deal with it only after the next tea break, several workers said. In the next hour or more, the reaction taking place in a storage tank went out of control. ''Internal leaks never bothered us,'' said one employee. Indeed, workers said that the reasons for leaks were rarely investigated. The problems were either fixed without further examination or ignored, they said.

- Several months before the accident, plant employees say, managers shut down a refrigeration unit designed to keep the methyl isocyanate cool and inhibit chemical reactions. The shutdown was a violation of plant procedures.

- The leak began, according to several employees, about two hours after a worker whose training did not meet the plant's original standards was ordered by a novice supervisor to wash out a pipe that had not been properly sealed. That procedure is prohibited by plant rules. Workers think the most likely source of the contamination that started the reaction leading to the accident was water from this process.

- The three main safety systems, at least two of which, technical experts said, were built according to specifications drawn for a Union Carbide plant at Institute, W. Va., were unable to cope with conditions that existed on the night of the accident. Moreover, one of the systems had been inoperable for several days, and a second had been out of service for maintenance for several weeks.

- Plant operators failed to move some of the methyl isocyanate in the problem tank to a spare tank as required because, they said, the spare was not empty as it should have been. Workers said it was a common practice to leave methyl isocyanate in the spare tank, though standard procedures required that it be empty.

- Instruments at the plant were unreliable, according to Shakil Qureshi, the methyl isocyanate supervisor on duty at the time of the accident. For that reason, he said, he ignored the initial warning of the accident, a gauge's indication that pressure in one of three methyl isocyanate storage tanks had risen fivefold in an hour.

- The Bhopal plant does not have the computer system that other operations, including the West Virginia plant, use to monitor their functions and quickly alert the staff to leaks, employees said. The management, they added, relied on workers to sense escaping methyl isocyanate as their eyes started to water. That practice violated specific orders in the parent corporation's technical manual, titled ''Methyl Isocyanate,'' which sets out the basic policies for the manufacture, storage and transportation of the chemical. The manual says: ''Although the tear gas effects of the vapor are extremely unpleasant, this property cannot be used as a means to alert personnel.''

- Training levels, requirements for experience and education and maintenance levels had been sharply reduced, according to about a dozen plant employees, who said the cutbacks were the result, at least in part, of budget reductions. The reductions, they said, had led them to believe that safety at the plant was endangered.

- The staff at the methyl isocyanate plant, which had little automated equipment, was cut from 12 operators on a shift to 6 in 1983, according to several employees. The plant ''cannot be run safely with six people,'' said Kamal K. Pareek, a chemical engineer who began working at the Bhopal plant in 1971 and was senior project engineer during the building of the methyl isocyanate facility there eight years ago.

- There were no effective public warnings of the disaster. The alarm that sounded on the night of the accident was similar or identical to those sounded for various purposes, including practice drills, about 20 times in a typical week, according to employees. No brochures or other materials had been distributed in the area around the plant warning of the hazards it presented, and there was no public education program about what to do in an emergency, local officials said.

- Most workers, according to many employees, panicked as the gas escaped, running away to save their own lives and ignoring buses that sat idle on the plant grounds, ready to evacuate nearby residents.

'A Top Priority'

At its headquarters in Danbury, the parent corporation said last month: ''Union Carbide regards safety as a top priority. We take great steps to insure that the plants of our affiliates, as well as our own plants, are properly equipped with safeguards and that employees are properly trained.''