No one has turned up so far to seek them either. Besides the foetuses, it has also preserved an equal number of livers, spleens and brains of foetuses, thinking that either a government institute or a private one would take them for research.

So on Sunday, the 22nd anniversary of the gas leak that killed 3,000 in its immediate aftermath and nearly 15,000 of related illnesses since, the foetuses were put on display to create awareness about the suffering that followed the tragedy and still haunts the city.

The foetuses belonged to pregnant women who died immediately from the gas leak on the night of December 3, 1984, or those who underwent abortions after the tragedy.

“I am not legally bound to preserve them but I took it as a social and moral responsibility,” Dr D K Satpathy, the institute’s director, told The Indian Express. “No one has shown any interest, though I have repeatedly written to the state government and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).”

He said the institute’s job was over with the postmortem when it was established that the deaths were indeed caused by the leaked gas, methyl isocyanate. “Once we established that the gas had crossed the placental blood barrier, we did not need the foetuses.”

Normally, they are disposed of once the criminal case is tried, he said.

According to him these control samples are still useful to compare the effect of the poisonous gas on lives exposed to it 22 years ago. The only thing the institute is doing with them is replacing formaline when it evaporates. “Initially, the Council did carry out a few studies but they stopped midway, and no one knows why,” said Satinath Sarangi, the managing trustee of Sambhavna Trust Clinic.

Dr Satpathy, who was the deputy director of the institute in December 1984, said the foetuses were never examined by the ICMR. Sarangi added that children exposed directly to the gas and those inside the womb when the gas leaked continued to suffer for years but there has not been any serious research on the subject.