Bhopal's victims say cash is missing

The Indian government is sitting on a large part of Union Carbide's original $470m compensation payment for the 1984 Bhopal disaster, according to a lawyer for the victims of the toxic gas escape.

It refuses to say how much money is left, but Srinivasan Muralidhar, who has represented Bhopal victims in the Indian supreme court appeals for almost seven years, estimates that it is about $240m (£165m).

Tribunals set up by the government to settle claims are trying to close the books on Bhopal this year, to widespread accusations of corruption.

Victims complain that the compensation payments, averaging about $580 (£414) each, do not even cover the loans many took out to pay medical bills and funeral costs.

The tribunal authorities say they were inundated with false claims. But Bhopal activists suspect that the government is keeping its payments to the bare minimum so that foreign investors will see cheap labour comes with a bonus: low liability for industrial accidents.

In addition the victims are suspicious about what the government is doing with their money.

The tribunals approved the payment of 14,824 claims for death blamed on the disaster, most of which occurred years after the gas escape. The average compensation was about $1,300: about 15% of the maximum allowed.

Most of the death settlements were low because the tribunals reduced the majority of the to injury cases, Satinath Sarangi, a victims' activist, said.

Abdul Jabbar, now a hard-line Bhopal activist, was living with his family about a mile from the pesticide plant on the night of the leak. His father, Abdul Sattar, died less than two years later. His brother Munne Khan died in 1996. Both succumbed to lung diseases, Mr Jabbar said. He himself has fibrosis in one lung.

The claims tribunal paid about $1,300 for his brother's death and about $550 for his father's, he said. The money went to his mother.

The tribunal is offering Mr Jabbar about $550 for his own suffering, but he refuses to take it, and is among the thousands of survivors fighting in Indian and US courts for more.

Their lawyers are arguing, for instance, that the victims have a right to sue in the US for compensation and the cleaning up of the pollution that affects the health of up to 20,000 people in Bhopal. A US appeal court is expected to rule later this year.

No one has yet decided who will clean up the toxic waste which environmental groups say is still seeping into drinking water from the ruins of the plant. Even now, no one is certain if the disaster was caused by negligence or, as Union Carbide insists, was an act of sabotage by an unhappy worker.

The disaster happened on December 3 when a reaction overheated a holding tank of highly toxic methyl isocyanate. It spewed out in a poisonous cloud which the night air transformed into a chemical vapour of at least 65 gases, including hydrogen cyanide.

The toxins enshrouded people as they lay in their beds. Within hours at least 2,000 were dead. Nearly 300 times that number have received compensation for injuries, from either initial leak or its after-effects.

The official death toll is now more than 5,000, but activists say the number of deaths from gas-related illnesses is closer to 20,000. Several hundred thousand survivors are still fighting the noxious legacy of the world's worst industrial disaster, trying to sue Union Carbide in the US despite its $470m out-of-court settlement with the Indian government in 1989.

the Indian supreme court said the settlement was better than the victims could have received under local law. But by keeping the claims out of the US courts, the deal also forced tunsatisfied claimants to search for justice in the maze of India's judicial system. Los Angeles Times