Bhopal is a sick city. Talk to car park attendants, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, or street urchins and they all know people whose health has been destroyed.

'We used to be normal. We'd fall ill once in a while but not like this, chronically ill,' said electrician Mohammed Idris as he stood outside Jawaharlal Nehru Cancer Hospital and Research Centre. He is certain that the gas leak is to blame. 'How can I be sure? Because we never had these awful diseases before. Whole families are ill,' he says.

Of the half million people exposed to the gas, an estimated 100,000 are partially or totally disabled and 200,000 require constant medical care. They live in a state of permanent or semi-permanent sickness, measuring their lives in pills and hospital visits.

Every painful breath, every cough, every failed attempt to wash the dishes or sweep the yard reminds them of the disaster that killed 6,000 people outright.

'Those who died that night were lucky,' says housewife Hameeda Begum. 'We're dying slowly every day. That Warren Anderson should come here to see what pain really is.'

She comes to the Sambhavna Trust clinic to get free medicine for her constantly aching joints. Every room in the clinic is packed. Like with most other victims, the US$510 (HK$3,970) that Hameeda received as compensation is gone, spent on medical treatment.

In 1989, the Indian government accepted US$470 million as final compensation from Union Carbide (now owned by Dow Chemical) without consulting the victims. This fell well short of the original demand for US$3 billion.

The majority of the victims received US$510 each - and that came only after years of bribing lawyers, judges and bureaucrats who had turned compensation into an industry.

'This amount is a joke,' said Abdul Jabbar who runs a voluntary help group and is a gas victim himself with fibrosis of the lungs. 'The World Trade Centre victims were given US$500,000. Yes, the standard of living is higher in the US but are Indian lives worth so little?'

The survivors are the poorest of the poor - manual labourers who can no longer work. Aziza Sultan, who visits the clinic for respiratory problems, says her husband can only work erratically. 'He might manage a few days or a week and then he falls ill or is exhausted and is in bed for a week,' she says.

Mr Jabbar wants the Bhopal authorities either to compensate the families for loss of income or give them light jobs so that they can continue to be productive.

His group organises light work for victims such as sewing or making paper bags. 'No work means no income. Families skip meals. I never imagined that people would be in this condition so many years later,' he said.

Mr Jabbar cannot believe that the Bhopal authorities stopped registering gas-related deaths in 1992. 'In Hiroshima, they are registering radiation-related deaths even now,' he says. Nor can he believe that no memorial has been built to the victims, or that the chief minister of the state announced two years ago that 'the city's residents are no longer suffering from the after-effects of the gas disaster'. And he is angered by the fact that the US can bomb Afghanistan for one man but India refuses to hunt down Mr Anderson in the US.

There are other, smaller heartaches hidden within the bigger catastrophe. Muslims living in other parts of Bhopal do not want their sons to marry girls from the gas-affected areas.

Rasheeda Begum, whose niece died last year from a brain tumour after being exposed to the gas when she was eight, says these girls are now undesirable. 'People don't want a daughter-in-law who might be a semi-invalid, be unable to do the housework and need expensive treatment. Or who might be infertile. Or not give birth to healthy children. They're scared,' she says.

Rasheeda says she wants Mr Anderson to face trial in India for culpable homicide. 'I don't want him lynched or anything the moment he steps off the plane,' she says. 'I just want justice done according to Indian law.'