NEW YORK - Union Carbide Corp. has agreed to accept the conditions laid down by a federal judge in order to have lawsuits over the Bhopal chemical disaster moved from American courts to India.

The decision, which was expected, was announced by company spokesman Ed Vandenameele at Carbide headquarters in Danbury, Conn.

"We are pleased that the court is sending the case to India where it belongs," Vandenameele said Thursday. "This is good for Union Carbide."

Lawyers for victims of the December 1984 gas leak, which killed an estimated 2,000 people and injured 200,000, had fought to keep the case in American courts.

But on May 12 U.S. District Judge John F. Keenan ruled that India is the appropriate site for the case because that is where the accident occurred, the victims live and most of the relevant witnesses and documents can be found.

The accident happened when methyl isocyanate gas leaded from a pesticide plant and drifted through a crowded slum in the middle of the night, catching residents completely unprepared.

Droves of American lawyers flocked to Bhopal , an impoverished city in central India, to sign up clients after the accident. More than 100 suits eventually were filed in this country's courts, all of which were consolidated in the case before Keenan.

The judge picked two of the private U.S. lawyers, F. Lee Bailey of Boston and Stanley Chesley of Cincinnati, and the Indian government's lawyer, Michael Ciresi of Minneapolis, to serve on a three-member executive committee representing the accident victims. And for more than a year, the judge urged the group to settle the case with Carbide out of court.

But internal squabbling between the Indian government and the private U.S. lawyers over who really represented the accident victims' interests made an agreement impossible. Chesley and Bailey at one point negotiated a $350 million pact, which fell apart after New Delhi complained that the amount was too small.

Chesley and Bailey have said they will appeal the order sending the case out of the United States. The American lawyers are expected to have no role in the Indian proceedings, nor will they be likely to recover any payment for the work they have done on the case.