September 18, 2014
A group of survivors of the 2004 Bhopal gas tragedy and people living in the areas near the abandoned Union Carbide factory held a protest outside the residence of the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister here on Thursday demanding adequate compensation and cleaning up of the factory site.
September 18, 2014
A group of survivors of the 2004 Bhopal gas tragedy and people living in the areas near the abandoned Union Carbide factory held a protest outside the residence of the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister here on Thursday demanding adequate compensation and cleaning up of the factory site.
Survivors of the Bhopal gas disaster chain their hands during a protest demanding compensation, outside the residence of Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, in Bhopal on Thursday.
Some of the protestors resorted to a ‘die-in’ agitation — lying prone on the road with white bed sheets covering their body from the head to the toe — while others tied themselves together with a long chain.
Five organizations, working for the welfare of the disaster survivors, organized the agitation. They demanded that the government revise the death and injury figures in the curative petition pending before the Supreme Court and to intervene in the case relating to the cleaning up of the factory site being heard in the U.S. Federal Court.
“The State government has presented the figure of 15,348 deaths in all its official records, except in the curative petition where it has mentioned a figure of only 5,295 deaths. This needs to be corrected,” the agitators said. The revision, they explained, was required to ensure that relatives of every gas victim received the compensation amount of Rs. 5 lakh.
They also pointed out that the State government had not appeared before the US Federal Court, in spite of notices, to present all the facts of the case.
The five groups plan to hold a rally in Delhi later this year to highlight the “apathy” of Central and State governments towards the victims and those residing near the abandoned factory site even 30 years after the accident.
Courtesy: The Hindu
