Learning to survive in Cyanide City, alias Bhopal

Surviving the world's greatest industrial disaster was bad enough, but finding an honest livelihood in this ''Cyanide City'' of claims and compensations is proving worse.

Wizened beyond her age, Akhtari Jehan looks 50, but the wrinkled skin is the effect of the 1984 leak of lethal cyanide-containing gas which also seared her lungs and left her an orphaned teenager.

Jehan, 30, is not married and probably will never be, but she considers herself lucky to have been accepted for a project training women victims in textile printing, run by the Mahasakti Seva Kendra and the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation since December 1995.

''The textile work is all I have to look forward to besides my brother and his children,'' she says.

Despite serious breathing difficulties, Jehan supervises work in two asbestos-roofed sheds where bedsheets, saris, and other items are produced by the NGOs for showrooms around the country.

Her coworker, Chitra, is one of the 100-odd women who do the actual batik, block and screen printing. ''All of us have basic training in colour-matching, designing and dyeing,'' she says.

Tears well up in Chitra's eyes when she recalls how she had to fight to regain the body of her daughter, snatched by people after government announced compensation against ''dead bodies.''

''What has happened has happened but the work of the living must continue,'' she says.

Chitra's pragmatism is typical in Bhopal where affected and unaffected alike appear busy making the best of a gruesome man-made tragedy from filing simple personal claims to organising fund-collections on an international scale.

Says Tanwant Singh Keer, minister in charge of rehabilitation, ''At the time of the tragedy, the population of Bhopal was just 850,000, but today there are one million claimants.''

Bhopal, complains Keer, teems with fly-by-night operators out to exploit the situation and run down the work of the government and NGO groups such as MSK and RGF, through agitations and by manipulating the national media.

''These people should be locked away in jail,'' Keer told visiting national media persons from New Delhi this week.

According to MSK coordinator Susheela Ghoshal, a culture of getting something for nothing has taken root in Bhopal because too many people look to compensation money. ''It is impossible to hire help of any kind in this city because of it,'' she says.

Lalit Shastri, Bhopal-based journalist and author of a book on the tragedy, however, says fraud has marred not only the efforts by the victims to help themselves but also those of organisations claiming to represent them.

Shastri says the prime example of fraud is the ''sellout'' by the government and the resultant whittling down to 450 million dollars of an original offer of a three billion dollar-settlement made by Union Carbide.

In refreshing contrast to the sometimes absurd claims and counter-claims, the women who work at the MSK-run sheds earn honest wages averaging Rs 400 a month and thus enjoy a measure of empowerment, says Ghoshal.

Tie-ups with organisations like the Madhya Pradesh Textile Corporation and handloom outlets such as Mrignayani, have kept the programme going and demand at present outstrips production.

''With each passing day, the skills and confidence of the women are growing and we expect production to pick up rapidly, leading to further expansion of the project,'' says Ms Iyengar, president of MSK.

Working like bees, the women apply set patterns and designs, some of them provided by leading artists from Bharat Bhavan, the well-known National Institution for Art and Culture in Bhopal.

Iyengar attributes the beehive-like activity to a productivity-linked remuneration scheme in which each operation such as the press of a block on cloth means extra cash.

Emphasis is laid on quality since the products are aimed at the swank city markets with the finishing stages personally overseen by Ghoshal and her fellow coordinators.

''Rejection of bulk orders could mean delay in payments, and consequently salary delays,'' she says, adding that in no case has the salary day been extended beyond two weeks.

UNI