Bhopal: Having failed to present their grievances before the Prime Minister for the last three years and the Chief Minister for the last six years, survivors of the Bhopal gas tragedy on Tuesday launched a protest to draw attention to issues of rehabilitation, justice and adequate compensation.
The campaign called “paanch guhaar” took off with children with congenital malformations sitting in protest before large portraits of PM Narendra Modi and CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan.
The images of the children pleading for medical care, social and economic rehabilitation, adequate compensation, punishment of the culprits and clean-up of lingering poison in soil and groundwater were then sent through twitter to the two leaders by the survivors.
They claimed that Chouhan had in 2011 promised to offer Rs 10 lakh to the families of those who were killed in the disaster and Rs 5 lakh to people who suffered from serious ailments after the leak of 1984, but nothing has been done since then.
The portraits of Modi and Chouhan will be carried to areas of the city that are affected by the gas disaster and places where groundwater is still poisoned with hazardous waste from the Union Carbide factory, said the survivors.
The “paanch guhaar” campaign will continue till the 33rd anniversary of the disaster on December 3, 2017, said Rachna Dhingra from Bhopal Group for Action and Information, a volunteer organisation fighting for justice through legal and RTI intervention.
Comments
0 comment