New Delhi: They may be diminutive in appearance, but these two women have changed the face of the campaign for gathering support for the survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy.

Champa Devi Shukla (52) and Rashida Bee (48), recently awarded for their environmental activism with the prestigious Goldman Prize in the US, have indeed come a long way from the women's union that they formed at a small factory in Bhopal in 1986 and have won worldwide support for the cause of the survivors of the 1984 gas tragedy that claimed thousands of lives.

Themselves victims of the gas leak, Shukla and Bee have been relentlessly campaigning for almost two decades now, even travelling to faraway Netherlands and the US to take on the officials of Dow Chemical, which has bought Union Carbide, the company whose factory in Bhopal was the origin of the disastrous gas leak.

"We did abroad what we have been doing in India. We held demonstrations, called press conferences, met people's groups, and we can confidently say that we have the support of even the shareholders of Dow Chemical," Shukla told.

Shukla is here with Bee to press the Government to seek a direction from a US court to order Dow Chemical to clean up the contamination in and around Union Carbide's abandoned factory in Bhopal.

Last month, Shukla and Bee hit the headlines in the American press by holding a demonstration outside the meeting of the shareholders of Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan and claim to have won the support of six per cent of them.