Twenty-five years after an explosion at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal released a toxic cloud of gas that killed at least 8,000 people, the survivors are still fighting for justice. And while the fight goes on, a new generation is growing up and still being affected by the disaster.

Listen to a report from the former site by Earth Beat’s Bhopal correspondent, Pooja Prakash:

Seven-year-old twins Shazia and Fozia are just two of the many victims of the Bhopal disaster; the pair moves enthusiastically but with a great deal of difficulty through their home in a poor neighbourhood just north of the old Union Carbide factory. Their mother Naseem is giving Koran lessons to a group of attentive girls from the neighbourhood but her own daughters cannot follow the lessons. The physically disabled girls also suffer from a developmental disorder and have a mental age of three. The twins play in the courtyard outside the house; every trip outside is a new adventure and every exploration of the courtyard is as if it were for the first time.

The neighbours no longer pay any attention to the twins; after all, they're not the only disabled children in the neighbourhoods surrounding the factory. Chingari, an aid organisation that provides schooling and physiotherapy, says that since 2005, it has counted more than 200 children under the age of 12 suffering from birth defects. Tarun Thomas from the Chingari Trust says this is, "higher than statistically explainable". All of the affected children have at least one parent who was exposed to the toxic cloud in 1984.
 
Pink water
Naseem has more problems than just caring for disabled twins. The water that comes out of the pump next to the house is pink and causes skin irritation, blisters and gastrointestinal problems for many people in the neighbourhood. A court order saying that clean drinking water must be provided to the area failed to meet its March 2008 deadline. Every few days, numerous small tanks are replenished with clean drinking water from a nearby dam but it's never enough and fights over water occur regularly. After the poor monsoon rains in July, several people died in fights over water.
 
Everything, including the groundwater, the air and the milk that young mothers feed their babies, is being poisoned by the same factory that released a deadly cloud of gas on 3 December 1984. Because the Chingari Trust does not have enough funding to conduct a proper investigation, it is difficult to determine the cause of the high rate of birth defects in the slums and poor neighbourhoods surrounding the factory.
 
Rusty pipes
Naseem can see the factory's towers and steel pipes from her house. Close up, it's no surprise that the terrain and surrounding areas are severely contaminated. The pipes are rusty and the tank that was blown into the air by a chemical reaction 25 years ago is still lying where it fell, surrounded by weeds. The floor of a storage shed is strewn with bottles with unreadable labels, some of them broken and some filled with an unknown substance. The windows are broken and the doors have been nailed shut.
 
In 1999, Greenpeace analysed the soil and discovered high concentrations of carcinogenic and neurotoxin compounds as well as chemicals known to cause miscarriages. The soil samples also contained chemicals that cause foetal brain damage, as well as neurological and immune system disorders.
 
Despite that, the factory and its grounds have never been decontaminated. Instead, the chemicals that were left lying around in 1984 are seeping ever deeper into the soil and spreading via the groundwater.
 
Demonstrations
Union Carbide and Dow Chemicals, the company that purchased Union Carbide in 2001, have successfully managed to evade responsibility for cleaning up the site. But the survivors of the disaster and its new victims are not giving up the fight. In the shadow of a large water tank that was erected near Naseem's house a year ago but never filled, Bhopal's victims hold a weekly gathering to discuss problems and plan campaigns and demonstrations. Earlier this year, their children joined them after starting Children against Dow Carbide.
 
Slowly but surely they are making progress. Thanks to an international campaign and help from lawyers, 27 members of the US Congress signalled their support for the victims of Bhopal and called on Dow Chemical to pay for cleaning up the Union Carbide site.
 
Shame
To mark the 25th anniversary of the disaster, Bhopal's victims are planning to hold demonstrations and processions as well as an exhibition and poetry readings. Hazra Bee, one of Naseem's neighbours and a leading activist says, "the main theme in all the events is that 25 years on, justice has still not been done". She, too, has a brain-damaged child; her husband could not deal with the shame of having a disabled child or being unemployed and left in 1990. She continues, "the most important thing for us is that Dow cleans up this area and takes responsibility for the suffering of the people here, so that our children have a better future and so that they don't carry on polluting. 'No more Bhopal,' that's our slogan".
 
You can find more RNW coverage of the Bhopal disaster anniversary at Earth Beat and, from Friday 4 December at The State We're In