Group to hold vigil on 20th anniversary of Bhopal disaster

The Bloomington chapter of the Association for India's Development will be sponsoring a vigil to commemorate the 20th anniversary of a deadly chemical disaster in Bhopal, India at 4 p.m. today in Dunn Meadow.\nThe primary goal of the vigil is to promote awareness of the Dec. 3, 1984 gas leak at a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, which killed more than 3,000 people, said Giri Krishnan, AID secretary and graduate student. \n"We also want to prevent any sort of accident like this from happening again," he said.\nAwareness of this issue is important because Union Carbide, which had since been purchased by Dow Chemical Company, has not made any efforts to decontaminate the area in the 20 years since the disaster.\n"Union Carbide has still not cleaned up the area and it had seeped into the water and the soil," said Saurabh Mishra, a graduate student and one of the vigil's organizers.\nFor more information, visit the Bloomington AID Web site at www.indiana.edu/~aid.