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Bhopal gas victims march for their rights

Each morning Shahnaz Hussain, 27, leaves her home in a slum opposite Bhopal's abandoned Union Carbide plant in India to walk to the nearest hand pump and returns home carrying foul-smelling water on her head knowing it is swarming with toxins.

Ms Hussain, her husband and three children drink the contaminated water. Occasionally, a municipal tanker comes with clean water but there is such a scramble for it, she often does not get any.

Every day, she and about 20,000 others in the slums drink a lethal cocktail of mercury, nickel, chromium, and lead. But the authorities appear unable to find a solution to the contamination of the groundwater around the rusting and derelict plant.

Angry at their demand for clean water being ignored, about 100 victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster that killed 20,000 people when gas leaked out of the plant, are marching 787km to New Delhi to make the government listen.

In a tragedy that appears to have no end, the first generation of survivors suffered respiratory problems from inhaling the deadly gas. 'My father died in the tragedy. He died in seconds. I escaped because I was visiting my aunt,' said Ms Hussain.

Now, many of the marchers are second-generation victims of the world's worst industrial disaster.

Tests by the government, independent laboratories, voluntary groups, Greenpeace and the BBC show the groundwater is unfit for human consumption.

A BBC investigation in 2004 said that some areas of the plant are so polluted with chemicals lying on the ground that anyone staying in the area for more than 10 minutes is likely to lose consciousness.

Local groups want clean, safe water to be piped to the affected communities, the factory site to be decontaminated and the toxins lying there removed.

They successfully petitioned the Supreme Court, which in 2004 ordered that clean, safe water be piped to the communities. The state government's only response has been to send in water tankers.

'These tankers are irregular and totally insufficient. And sending in water tankers is not a permanent solution,' said Vinuta Gopal, a Greenpeace spokeswoman.

Ms Gopal says the only small hope is that the march appears to be rousing the conscience of some Indian politicians.

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