05_january

Tsunami News

JANUARY 2005

A Queen is forced to leave

Published by TIMES OF INDIA

30 Jan 2005

The palace has gone. The empire is lost. And the queen is forced to leave. The tsunami has done it all.

"Every thing is over now. The tsunami has taken away everything. My people, my fields and the small peaceful world, where everyone was so happy," said 72-year old 'Rani Fathima', the queen of an empire in the Nancowry group of island in Andaman and Nicobar.

Nancowry is a collection of three low-lying islands in the middle of the Nicobar archipelago, which bore the brunt of the tsunami.

The Nicobars, with a population of more than 42,000, were one of the places worst hit by the tsunami, with a death toll of 1,489 while other 5,541 were missing since December 26.

The queen was evacuated from a village of Nancowry island called Champin, which was her kingdom till December 26, where her decision used to be the final one.

"She was ill. So we evacuated her to Port Blair from Nancowry via an Indian Air Force aircraft," says Sabira, Fathima's younger daughter.

Despite her poor health, the queen is busy meeting the bureaucrats here for sending relief to her remote island.

Her younger son, Rashid Yusuf, is coordinating between the villagers and the relief operation officers for proper dispatch of relief materials.

Happier times: Prince Rashid Yusuf (right) at his birthday party with Dr. Simron Jit Singh (left) of the Andaman and Nicobar Associations during the IUAES Congress at Calcutta, December 2004 - 2 weeks before the tsunami devastated his islands.

'Rani ghat' (Queen's Palace), as the Nicobarese know it, or three buildings on Champin, was where the queen's family of 42 lived and from where they had to flee when the killer waves stormed in.

"The title (queen) was bestowed on Fatima's grandmother, a Nicobarese woman called Islon, by a grateful British government, obliged with the service rendered by her," says Sabira.

Fathima's grandmother Islon and mother Lachmi were treated as queens even after the country's Independence.

Queen Islong had only one child, a daughter named Lachmi, who succeeded her as a widely respected island leader until her death in 1989.

Queen Fathima was also an only child. She has eight children, including three sons. But as per the system of female succession, eldest daughter Aisya, 49, will be her successor.

"We have already selected the location for rehabilitation of our people. The administration has promised us to build our houses as soon as possible," said Rashid Yusuf who advised his men to select an elevated land deep inside the forest to set up the village again.

The administration has assured all kind of help to this royal family. "Our first priority is to build houses for tsunami affected people before monsoon," official sources said.

Chief Secretary of Andaman and Nicobar VV. Bhat, however, says there is no queen or king in these islands. "They may consider anyone as queen but the Government do not recognise any one as queen. It is their internal matter," he said.

Editor's note:

The "Chief Secretary of the Andaman and Nicobar islands" heads the local bureaucracy. He does not head "the Government". It is not for a government servant (however grand and inflated) to recognize or not recognize the existence of royalty in the Nicobar islands.

A deadly bureaucracy in the Andamans

by COLIN GONSALVES

received from SUDARSHAN RODRIGUEZ
Marine Conservation Analyst
Flat 2B, Adithya Apartments
38 Balakrishna Road
Valmiki Nagar,Thiruvanmiyur
Chennai-600 041
Tamilnadu, India

Phone:+91 44 5201 9470
Mobile: +91 9840680127
Fax: +91 44 52019468
Email: sudarshanr@yahoo.com

26 Jan 2005

One would have thought that in a disaster of this magnitude even ineffective bureaucrats would put their shoulder to the wheel and take assistance from all well meaning citizens and push on without regard to petty rules and red tape. But the experiences of the NGOs have been to the contrary. Social workers, doctors and others are wasting their time at Port Blair. Thirty doctors from Medecins Sans Frontieres and Voluntary Health Association and six doctors from Kerala have been refused permission to move to the other islands.

In the mean while, Paul Sanjit, a 38 year old Nicobari on the Island Kakana fell ill on the 12th of January. There was no doctor to attend to him. He died that evening.

While the Relief Commissioner said that he had a million water purification tablets they were apparently not reaching the people. There were complaints of women needing sanitary napkins. The Anand Margis at Hut Bay complained that they could not get rice while it is said that the Government godowns are full of grain. Two hundred cycles meant for Central Nicobar are not being transported to the islands. Mothers want mosquito nets for their infant children. People need axes for the making of houses. In Car Nicobar seventy 'huris' (boats) were lost. An NGO offered government two fiberglass boats but they were not accepted. They were then taken by an NGO and sent to the islands. Freight charges have been introduced for the first time for relief work. However, even when the NGO's pay the cargo does not reach.

As a result rising anger has manifested itself in ugly incidents. The Tehsildar at Hut Bay was tied up by local people. An official supervising relief operation at Camorta was criticized by tribals because of insensitive remarks that he allegedly made. An officer at Nicobar having not bathed for days took one in mineral water. He has now been replaced.

Cambell Bay

A Class I gazetted officer living at Laxminagar recounted his tale of woe. The Tsunami struck on the 26th destroying everything. For three days no one came to their rescue. The Assistant Commissioner ('A.C.'), assuming, since his area was not badly affected, that the remainder of the island was safe, apparently sent a radio message that Cambell Bay was fine. No helicopters flew over. The coast guard did not provide relief. In desperation on 29th morning the entire group began trekking towards the headquarters. They felt very let down when they heard on the radio that Indian planes and ships had reached Sri Lanka while they were still not rescued. At 10. 30 that night they were still on the road looking for the AC. They were told, ''searching for the A.C. is like searching for God.''

Champin

The earthquake struck Champin in Nancowry Island causing extensive damage. The A.C. in charge was requested to depute three administration boats for rescuing people. He declined because he had received a signal from the Director of Shipping Services not to send the boats. The A.C. was requested to send rations to Champin but he said he could not send a boat. Then one Nepas Levi managed to swim from Trinket to Camorta. He requested that a boat be sent to rescue people. Two small navy boats with the commanding officer set out at once. The officer saved the life of a seven years old child from Trinket. A resident, Rashid Yousuf was one of the first persons to give his four boats for rescue. Together with the police they rescued two hundred people from Trinket, Safed Balu and Chota and Bara Inaka. Mrs. Priscilla of Pilpillow village floated for three days and reached Teressa. If the boat had been sent earlier she might not have had to go through this ordeal and who knows how many more wo

uld have been saved. Through all this the A.C. in charge insisted that everything was ''under control.'' A request was made to him to supply rations free. He said that he had no orders from a higher authority to supply free rations. These were released only after Dr. Naresh of the civil hospital insisted that the cost of the rations be deducted from his salary.

Why the great secrecy? Apparently thousands of non-tribals live illegally in the Andamans with the connivance of the officials. Retired Government employees have houses on tribal land and are cultivating land, an activity prohibited by law. The excuse of tribal passes is used to keep out experts so that the actual functioning of the administration is not exposed.

What needs to be done? First, no tribal pass should be issued without consulting the Tribal Council. They seek 100% reservation in government jobs. They must be an integral part of all planning processes. The Autonomous Tribal Council with increased powers is a long pending demand. Loss must be assessed immediately. The survey done by the administration is unreliable. Repayment of bank loans and the other liabilities of the tribals must be waived. Compensation in Tamil Nadu is Rs. 1,00,000 for death, Rs. 10,000 for house reconstruction, Rs. 5000 for cremation expenses and smaller amounts for grain and utensils. In the islands the only compensation paid is the initial Rs. 2000 despite the Prime Minister's announcement of Rs. 1,00,000 compensation for death. The banks are offering loans but are unclear about whether the existing liability is to be waived. The Lt. Governor declared a payment of Rs. 60 lakhs to the Tribal Development Cooperative Society but this is yet to materialize. Th

e children need to start studying but the books have not reached. A scholarship system must be set up. The children are traumatized and persons with professional counseling skills are needed immediately. The process by which a tribal can get a contract for work takes up to one year and needs to be radically changed. Boats must be given priority. Most of all NGOs must be allowed in but only after clearance from the Tribal Councils.

As things stand today senor persons from leading Indian NGOs are twiddling their thumbs at Port Blair. They were bluntly told by the administration that the government did not need their help. Even in the Little Andamans and Cambell Bay where permits are not necessary journalists and NGOs are now blocked after reports critical of the administration emerged from those islands. The administration promises to allow funding to reach Hut Bay, Little Andamans and Cambell Bay but that permission has not yet been granted. However the need is far greater in the Nicobar Islands. Give us the money, is the stand of the administration, we will do the work

Andaman Trust founded

by MADHUSREE MUKHERJEE
lopchu@att.ne

26 Jan 2005

The Andaman and Nicobar Trust Account has been created. It will collect funds for rebuilding the lives and livelihoods of the indigenous Nicobarese, at least a third of whom were washed away by the tsunami. The fund is to be used, insofar as possible, by the Nicobarese themselves. They face an uphill task, not just because of the bereavements but because large parts of the Nicobar Islands have sunk during the earthquake, and many formerly inhabited areas, which were near the coast, are now under the sea. See satellite photos at www.nrsa.gov.in for an idea of the damage.

The trust is the brainchild of Dr. Simron Jit Singh, a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Social Ecology, University of Klagenfurt in Vienna and author of "In the Sea of Influence: A World System Perspective of the Nicobar Islands" (2003). He spent years studying the Nicobarese and ended up finding ways to empower them. Simron is now on his way to the Nicobars to help the Nicobarese rebuild. Because of distance and logistics, it has been extremely difficult for the Nicobarese not only to receive aid but also to articulate their needs; they need spokespersons they can trust.

Please donate to the Andaman Nicobar Trust Account. The Trust account is operated by a Notary and under the responsibility of Prof. Marina Fischer-Kowalski, who heads the Institute for Social Ecology. The fund will be donated for the economic rehabilitation of the Nicobarese once official channels are opened.

Details can be found at
http://www.andaman-nicobar-fund.org/

Efforts to revive tourism in the Andamans

A&N Administration Press Release

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

25 Jan 2005

A large gathering of people consisting of representatives from Andaman Chamber of Commerce & Industry, Andaman Tourism Guild, travel agents, tour operators and general public ventured into the waters of the Carbyn's Cove beach to send a strong message to the world that Andaman is safe and open for domestic and international tourists. The Lt. Governor, Prof. Ram Kapse, the first lady Smt. Smita Kapse and Shri K. Krishanan, Chairman PBMC also participated. Speaking on the occasion the Lt. Governor called upon the tourism industry to endeavor to bring back tourists from all over the world.

He mentioned that since tourism has been identified as a thrust area along with fishing and high value agriculture, the union government is also encouraging the revival of the tourism sector in the Islands. He emphasized that the three thrust areas would be revived and given importance so that the islanders get employed in these sectors. He called upon everyone concerned to work as a team to revive these sectors and mentioned that this should be seen as a start of a new era. He stated that the Administration will build a new Andaman and the tourism sector will be made successful. He praised the media for highlighting positively about the tourism potential of the Islands.

Turtles nesting again

by SANJIB KUMAR ROY

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

24 Jan 2005

Helicopters scouring a devastated Indian island have sighted endangered sea turtles and they are nest-ing again at new locations a month after the tsunamis wrecked their habitat.

Coastguard spokesman Commandant Sanjay Anchalwal said Monday that olive Ridley and Leatherback turtles were spotted at Indira Point off the ravaged island of Campbell Bay, the southern-most tip of India. (= the southernmost point of Great Nicobar island). Campbell Bay lies just 163 kilometres (101 miles) from Banda Aceh in Indonesia, the epicentre of the December 26 undersea earthquake that sent tsunami waves crashing across Asian shores.

The remote island, one of more than 500 in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, bore the full fury of the towering waves that submerged Indira Point and washed away turtle nesting places.

"A Coast Guard helicopter Friday sighted turtle nesting for the first time since the disaster," the spokesman said, adding that the turtles had shifted their breeding grounds some 10 kilometres (six miles) from the orginal location.

"The nesting site has shifted from the original ground called South Bay Galathia river to a newly-formed beach at Indira Point," Anchal-wal added.

"Some 20 tracks are visible and a ground team has also found newly-laid eggs," he said. Old nests appeared to have been smashed by the waves and the turtles settled among debris washed ashore at the new location on Indira Point. However the primitive, protected animals which co-existed with the dinosaurs, were not sighted in large numbers.

"Our men could locate only four to five turtles while in peak season earlier we have noticed 15-20 turtles every day coming ashore to lay eggs," added coast guard official Pankaj Verma.

The original breeding site known as "Point 41" is completely deserted and half submerged in the sea following the devastation.

Six turtle researchers from the western Indian city of Pune and 16 lo-cal lighthouse personnel are still missing from Indira Point since De-cember 26.

Andaman environmentalists on Monday cheered after the official sighting which was reported in Port Blair, capital of the federally-ruled territory.

"Life finds out its way. It is really nice to see these endangered turtles claiming a new land for laying eggs," said Pankaj Sekhsaria of the An-daman and Nicobar Environment group.

"Other researchers too have located leatherbacks and olive ridleys on a beach on Rutland island," some 130 kilometres (80 miles) from Port Blair, Sekhsaria said.

Four species of sea turtles -- the leatherback, green, hawksbill and olive ridley, the most common in Indian waters -- nested on the beaches of the Car Nicobar chain of islands between December and February.

All but the leatherback were once hunted on the islands for meat and the creatures remain a lucrative target for poachers.

Some 7,500 people were killed or are listed as missing on the Andamans since the waves hit on December 26.

The archipelago is also home to brakish water crocodiles, deer, wild boar and a huge variety of birds.

Good news: the Port Blair government begins to listen

Press Release from SOCIETY FOR ANDAMAN AND NICOBAR ECOLOGY (SANE)
sane@andamanisles.com
Tel. +91 3192 232929 and +91 3192 234624; Fax: +91 3192 236014
and
Dr. VISHVAJIT PANDYA
vishvajit_pandya@da-iict.org
Tel. +91 9898024561)

23 Jan 2005

In contrast to non-indigenous settlers, indigenous tribal communities have shown a greater resilience in response to the grave disaster. They have picked up the pieces of life and started rebuilding without entirely depending on the hard-pressed administration. For example, instead of just waiting for the relief materials, the Onges have already resumed their hunting and the Nicobarese are engaged in replanting their horticultural gardens. This perhaps indicates towards a unique worldview of these indigenous communities in which their understanding of life and death is derived from their lived-in observation of chaos and disorder in nature.

This perspective on their natural environment is also evident in the oral narratives and mythologies of Andamanese and Nicobarese indigenous communities.

Following the Tsunami disaster, the Andaman and Nicobar administration was overwhelmed with the task of handling excessive negotiating demands, attention and criticisms put forth by dozens of relief and rehabilitation organisations and politicians which made it difficult for the administration to rely on appropriate co-operations and strategies.

As the dust settles, the administration has taken first positive steps by acknowledging the wisdom of the local communities, the resourcefulness and experience of local NGOs and accepting inputs of scientists who have been working in the area for several years.

On 23rd January morning, the Lt. Governor of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, Prof. Ram Kapse, welcomed the proposal of a local NGO, Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology (SANE) and associated scientists whereby the individuals and volunteers of SANE would contribute to the process of rebuilding indigenous lands.

The proposal for Nicobars was developed on the basis of an invitation of the Nicobar Youth Association and the Tribal Councils. In the case of Onges of Little Andaman, drawing up a plan would be based on a long standing relationship of Prof. Vishvajit Pandya (DA-IICT, Gandhinagar), an anthropologist working with the Onges for nearly 2 decades. The Nicobar efforts are built on the years of work of Dr. Simron Jit Singh, a human ecologist from the University of Klagenfurt, Vienna. The Nicobar Youth Association has already liaisoned a group of young Nicobarese volunteers who would assist in the process.

This process would involve eliciting community's perception in rebuilding the community with cultural sensitivity and minimum imposition but maximum appropriate assistant.

Says, Samir Acharya, Secretary of SANE, "We at SANE are elated that the administration has decided to put our information and knowledge base with the expertise of our associate scientists to the best interest of the affected indigenous communities".

Relief blocked by Port Blair government - NGOs claim

by SUBIR BHAUMICK
Published by BBC News, Calcutta

Received from MADHUSREE MUKHERJEE
lopchu@att.net

23 Jan 2005

Tribal organisations in India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands have severely criticised the local administration.

They have accused it of refusing to carry relief material from local voluntary groups to remote islands which were devastated by the tsunami. The island administration has stopped voluntary groups from relief work in the worst-affected Nicobar region.

Last week, Red Cross officials accused the authorities in the Andaman and

Nicobar Islands of "hijacking" aid.

Little role

Indian officials reported 30 more tsunami deaths on Monday, increasing the death toll in last month's catastrophe to 10,744. The figures show that 1,894 islanders are dead in the archipelago, with more than 5,500 missing.

The administration in Andaman and Nicobar says it has supplied enough relief to all communities hit by the tsunami - so there was little role for voluntary groups.

A government spokesman said some local groups were taking huge quantities of relief material from foreign non-governmental organisations and asking the administration to transport them to the islands.

The spokesman said the government would give priority to shipping its own supplies around the islands.

Earlier, the administration said that while overseas groups would not be allowed to join the relief effort, any material they could provide was welcome.

Red Cross officials last week alleged that supplies shipped to the islands' capital, Port Blair, were being seized at the docks, apparently for distribution by the government.

The Tribal Council in the Nancowrie group of islands, the area in Nicobar worst hit by the tsunami, has accused the local administration of being insensitive to local relief requirements.

It said in a statement on Monday that the administration had now stopped local voluntary groups from conducting relief work in the Nicobar area.

The council's chairperson Ayesha Majid said that was most unfortunate, arguing that local groups are aware of the typical needs of the Nicobarese people, which is not the case with the federal officials working on the islands.

Communications restored

A&N Administration Press Release

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

23 Jan 2005

Due to the recent earthquake and the tsunami which followed, telephone exchanges across the Islands were destroyed. In most of the cases, damages occurred to the exchange equipment, battery and power plants and the satellite receivers, among other things.

The staff of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited immediately sprung out to different parts of the Islands carrying replacement equipments and other materials and they were able to restore the functioning of most of the exchanges within a short span of time.

The functioning of the Swadeshnagar exchange in Mayabunder has been restored, where the optical fibre was replaced. The Bambooflat exchange was shifted to a new building with fresh exchange equipments and the exchange is now functioning full fledged. At Hutbay, the exchange has started functioning from a satellite building and the equipments were replaced. At Car Nicobar, the optical fibre equipment, engine alternator and the satellite receivers were damaged. Those were replaced in the exchange building and the Car Nicobar exchange is now working properly. At Katchal and Teressa, the exchange equipment, battery & power plant, engine alternator, satellite receiver and the copper cable and pillars were destroyed. They have all been replaced and the exchanges are functioning from new buildings. At Camorta, the satellite receiver was repaired and the exchange is functioning. At Campbell Bay exchange the equipments, battery & power plant, engine alternator, optical fibre cable and the copper cable and pillars were damaged. These were replaced and the exchange is working from a satellite building. Efforts are underway to install an Inmarsat satellite phone connection at the Champin exchange (on Nancowry island) .

The BSNL exchanges in the Islands are operated on 48V DC power delivered from the battery & power plant, which in turn operates on AC 220V/415 V commercial power supply. Standby AC supply is generated by the engine alternator. Exchange networks in different Islands are in turn connected to the satellite hub at Port Blair through satellite media.

Lt.Governor of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands visits Little Andaman

A&N Administration Press Release

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

22 Jan 2005

The Lt. Governor, Prof. Ram Kapse today visited Little Andaman to review relief operations there. From the helipad the Lt. Governor drove to the Primary Health Centre (PHC) set up in the Forest Corporation Guest House and met the doctors. The Lt. Governor and the First Lady visited the ward set up in a Govt. quarter and enquired after the welfare of the patients there.

The Lt. Governor visited the relief camp set up for the Onges and interacted with them in the presence of Prof. Vishwajit Pandya, renowned Anthropologist. The Onges discussed matters relating to shifting their settlement to safer locations. The Lt. Governor also met the inmates of another camp for settlers and listened to their problems.

The Lt. Governor visited the Hut Bay jetty and the breakwater and inspected the work going on there. He met the peoples' representatives and the general public at the APWD Guest House. The Lt. Governor invited PRI members to come to Port Blair on 25th January, 2005 to discuss the matters relating to their demands.

Prominent among the demands was resettlement of entire Hut Bay area, repair of jetty, road, starting of schools, aid to fishermen, starting postal services, cell phone facility and radio and TV at every relief camp.

The Lt. Governor asked the authorities to start schools from Monday. He also asked TV and Radio may be provided at the camps. He asked the PWD officials to repair the roads. He also informed that sufficient stock of Kerosene would be sent to Hut Bay. He informed that other matters would be taken up with the Central Govt. during his visit to New Delhi.

The Lt. Governor also interacted with members of some NGOs working in Little Andaman. The First Lady Smt. Smita Kapse met women and children and enquired about their problems and needs.

The Lt. Governor on his visit was accompanied by the Member of Parliament, Shri Manoranjan Bhakta, Deputy Commissioner, Andamans, Shri Gyanesh Bharti, Director of Fisheries, Dr. V. Krishnamurthy and Chief Executive Officer of Zilla Parishad, Shri CM Singh.

Islands denied relief by Port Blair bureaucracy

by SUBIR BHAUMIK
Published by BBC News, Calcutta

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

19 Jan 2005

Tribal organisations in India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands have severely criticised the local administration. They have accused it of refusing to carry relief material from local voluntary groups to remote islands which were devastated by the tsunami. The island administration has stopped voluntary groups from relief work in the worst-affected Nicobar region.

Last week, Red Cross officials accused the authorities in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of "hijacking" aid.

Little role

The administration in Andaman and Nicobar says it has supplied enough relief to all communities hit by the tsunami - so there was little role for voluntary groups. A government spokesman said some local groups were taking huge quantities of relief material from foreign non-governmental organisations and asking the administration to transport them to the islands. The spokesman said the government would give priority to shipping its own supplies around the islands.

Local correspondents say the Andaman-Nicobar administration is determined to prevent foreign voluntary groups from joining the relief effort, even if it is by proxy. They say the local administration is trying to stop local voluntary groups from receiving foreign support. Earlier, the administration said that while overseas groups would not be allowed to join the relief effort, any material they could provide was welcome.

Red Cross officials last week alleged that supplies shipped to the islands' capital, Port Blair, were being seized at the docks, apparently for distribution by the government.

The Tribal Council in the Nancowrie group of islands, the area in Nicobar worst hit by the tsunami, has accused the local administration of being insensitive to local relief requirements. It said in a statement on Monday that the administration had now stopped local voluntary groups from conducting relief work in the Nicobar area. The council's chairperson Ayesha Majid said that was most unfortunate, arguing that local groups are aware of the typical needs of the Nicobarese people, which is not the case with the federal officials working on the islands

New commander-in-chief of armed forces in the Andaman and Nicobar islands

Published by THE DAILY TELEGRAMS, Port Blair

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

18 Jan 2005

Lieutenant General Aditya Singh has taken over as commander-in-Chief of Andaman & Nicobar Command from Lt. General BS Thakur, who has proceeded to New Delhi to take up his new assignment as Vice Chief of Army Staff.

Lt. Gen. Aditya Singh who completed his education from Mayo College, Ajmer, joined the National Defence Academy in 1963 where he distinguished himself by winning the President's Silver Medal. At Indian Military Academy he excelled in all fields and was awarded the 'Sword of Honour' and Gold Medal for being first in the order of merit. He was commissioned into The Deccan horse, one of the oldest regiments of the Armoured Corps. In addition to normal command and staff appointments, Lt. Gen. Singh has served as a Brigade Major of a Mountain Brigade in J&K and in Bhutan with the Indian Military Training Team. He has also served as the Brigadier General Staff of a Command HQ, where he was responsible for Maritime Operations in island territories.

Being an alumni of the prestigious National Defence College, Lt. Gen. Singh has had the honour of commanding The Deccan horse and The President's Bodyguard. He has also commanded a Sector in High Altitude area of the Indo Tibet Border, and Armoured Brigade in Rajasthan and an Armoured Division.

Thereafter, he was Commander of the Higher Command wing at the Army War College and later took over as Chief of Staff of a Pivot Corps. He then commanded 21 Corps, a Strike Corps. Lt. Gen Aditya Singh is an excellent sportsman and his sporting interests include golf and swimming apart from representing the Indian Army in Polo, an ANC release said.

Tsunami affects turtle conservation programs throughout Indian Ocean

by HILLARY CHEW

Published by JANAKI LENIN, Draco Films/Draco Books
P.O. Box 21, Chengalpattu 603001, India,
Tel.+91-4114-220195
www.snakesofindia.com

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

18 Jan 2005

Marine turtle conservation programmes surrounding the Indian Ocean suffered considerable damage from the giant ocean waves, severely undermining regional plans to save the highly endangered marine reptile.

Six out of seven species of sea turtles in the world are found in this region which was ravaged by killer waves triggered by the Dec 26 undersea earthquake off Sumatra. The tsunami disaster has claimed over 150,000 lives, displaced hundreds of coastal communities and disrupted the livelihood of thousands of fisherfolk.

The Indian Ocean and South East Asian Marine Turtle Memorandum of Understanding (IOSEA MoU) has started assessing the extent of damage following the tsunami tragedy.

"The IOSEA MoU Secretariat is compiling information on turtle conservation projects around the Indian Ocean that may have been affected by the tsunami," says its coordinator Douglas Hykle who is based in Bangkok.

Sri Lankan tsunami survivor Dudley Pereira lost some 200 hawkbill sea turtles to the tsunami when the waves destroyed his sea turtle tanks. In his hands is all that's left of his collection of the endangered turtles. The secretariat has been coordinating the turtle revival programme in the region since 2001.

"We will also collaborate with other organisations which are conducting or supporting assessments on the ground to ensure that important turtle habitats such as nesting beaches, oral reefs, seagrass beds and mangroves are covered by these studies."

Facilities in the Indian Nicobar Islands, Sri Lanka and Thailand were the hardest hit with reports of dead and missing field staff and destruction of research stations.

The Andaman Nicobar Environment Trust field station at Campbell Bay in Great Nicobar was devastated when seismic waves slammed the island. Six out of seven field staff, including four scientists studying the Olive Ridley and Leatherback turtles, are still missing.

A field assistant, Santosh Augu, who sustained two broken collarbones, miraculously survived after he was reported missing for 17 days. Santosh related that a few of them had clung on to a tree, which was uprooted after the third wave battered the coast. He has not seen his colleagues since.

The Gahirmatha marine sanctuary in India's Kendrapara district, the largest breeding ground for the Olive Ridley, escaped the wrath of the tsunami.

Nesting at the sanctuary occurs on a cluster of islands - Barunei, Nasi-1, Nasi-2, Babubali and Agarnasi off the east coast. Waves surged into the Babubali and Agarnasi nesting grounds, causing minor erosion on the sandy beach. Forestry personnel who were present escaped unhurt as their camps were a safe distance from the coast.

The Kosgoda nesting beach on the southern coast of Sri Lanka was hit by a six-metre high wave which surged 1.5km inland. The Turtle Conservation Project (TCP) is managed by 17 local egg-protectors, six research officers and some foreign volunteers. Everyone was saved except for three egg-protectors who were swept into the sea.

The TCP field station located 1km inland was inundated and suffered damage to equipment and educational materials although the building remained intact.

Immediate relief efforts went into operation to assess damage and provide basic humanitarian aid to the affected staff and their families.

The turtle conservation project which finds its strength in community participation, needs to recommence operations as soon as possible to enable its staff to earn an income amidst the bleak future faced by the fishing community which has suffered heavy losses in terms of damaged fishing boats and gear. Two other nesting grounds at Rekawa and Bundala National Park have yet to be surveyed.

Several privately-owned turtle hatcheries were also affected by the killer waves which shattered holding tanks and washed away the reptiles. One operator lost about 10,000 eggs and a few hundred hatchlings.

In Thailand, three turtle research facilities were badly affected. At Koh Phra Thong, the Italian Naucrates conservation project was wiped out and suffered heavy losses. Two of its marine biologists, Rebecca Clark from Canada and Lisa Jones from Britain, who were working on the Golden Buddha Beach, were swept away by the giant waves. A memorial fund has been set up in the biologists' names to continue Naucrates's conservation work there.

Clark was the science manager onboard Ocean Alliance's whale-research vessel Odyssey before she went on sabbatical leave to Thailand. In memory of the young scientist, the alliance has set up an internship fund for young women from developing nations who are interested in science.

Located in the same province of Phang Nga as Naucrates, the Thai navy's turtle head-start programme at the Tap Lamu naval base was also in ruins. Two thousand turtles from two months to seven years old were lost.

In neighbouring Phuket, the Marine and Coastal Resource Development and Research Institute which was conducting research on the Olive Ridley and green turtle, reported 20 missing Olive Ridley turtles.

The institute's biologist, Kongkiat Kittiwattanawong, fears that the tsunami incident may push the dwindling turtle population one step closer to extinction. "It's too early to tell the full impact but this is certainly not going to help," he reportedly told Reuters.

Like a true scientist, Kongkiat remains undaunted by the tsunami tragedy. He took advantage of the male green turtle brought in by the waves to chart the reptile's movement to determine its migratory route. A satellite transmitter was attached to its carapace.

Marine turtles are migratory reptiles with vastly separated feeding and breeding grounds as shown by the satellite tracking programme conducted on female animals which come ashore to lay eggs.

"We have never been able to attach a transmitter to a male green turtle before, so this should help our understanding of how and where they live," Kongkiat was quoted as saying.

Kongkiat feared that sea turtles might be more adversely affected by the tsunami than other marine creatures as they need to surface regularly for oxygen. The battered nesting beaches strewn with debris and steep sand banks might also deter nesting females during the current nesting season.

Hykle acknowledges that it may take months before some of the projects affected by the tsunami are once again operational.

The priority now is on immediate relief efforts to get local communities back on their feet.

"Nevertheless, it may be possible to coordinate the collection of baseline data from around the region and analyse the impact on nesting in the short-term," says Hykle, adding that the matter would be raised at the upcoming signatories' meeting in March. Twenty countries have since signed the MoU.

As concern of destruction to coastal ecosystems mounts, it is feared that the surviving turtles may not find their regular food sources like seagrass, as in the case of the green turtle.

Under IOSEA MoU's conservation and management plan, turtle range states in the region are supposed to cooperate in protecting turtle habitats which include both nesting and feeding grounds.

"In Thailand, for example, there is discussion about using this tragic event as an opportunity to review zoning regulations in coastal areas, though not necessarily with turtle conservation in mind. However, turtles could benefit if resorts were rebuilt with the integrity of coastal ecosystems in mind, and disturbance from light and other factors was reduced," says Hykle.

Second open letter to the President of India

by MAHASWETA DEVI, ROOPA GANGULY , SITA VENKATESWAR, and MADHUSREE MUKHERJEE

Received from MADHUSREE MUKHERJEE
lopchu@att.net

17 Jan 2005

To Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
The President of India
Rashtrapati Bhavan
New Delhi

17th January 2005

Dear Sir,

It is three weeks since the tsunami hit. The Nicobars are devastated, with reportedly all coastal areas submerged. The death toll is immense, and official counts are clearly understated. Aid reached too late to save many of the injured. To this day, difficult terrain has made it impossible for search-and-rescue missions to reach everywhere.

Throughout this tragedy, the callousness and inefficacy of the local administration has been astounding. On January 12, a 38-year-old Nicobarese man fell ill and died in a Central Nicobar relief camp. No doctor is present in this camp. By another report, around 40 volunteer doctors are in Port Blair, eager and ready to offer their services to the afflicted, but are not being permitted to go to the Nicobars. Further, the administration is requiring NGOs that wish to transport relief materials to the Nicobars to pay for the freight; but when the NGOs agreed to this condition, they were told all the ships were busy. The Nicobarese are eager to start rebuilding their lives, for which task they need tools as simple as daus and axes. For some reason the administration is not providing such tools, nor is it allowing NGOs to do so. India has the resources to deal with the catastrophe, we are repeatedly assured, but so far there is no evidence that India has the quality of governance required for such a task.

Not only have the Nicobarese lost a third, if not half, of their population, they have also lost the coconut plantations that were once their livelihood. With coastal areas submerged, and most remaining parts of the islands covered with forest, it has become unclear where the Nicobarese are to rebuild their lives and on what resources they are to live. Illegal settlers, who have long plagued these gracious and gentle indigenous people, cornered much of the early aid and occupied the remaining high ground. These settlers must be permanently removed. In general, the administration must respond quickly and positively to Nicobarese needs as articulated by their own representatives. Late aid compounded by continued neglect leaves the Government of India open to charges of human rights violations.

We enclose, for your information, an extract from a report by Manish Chandi, a researcher with the Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team, on the extent of physical damage to the Nicobars; a revealing report by local-born journalist Denis Giles on early relief to the Nicobars; and copies of three petitions by the Nicobarese themselves.

Too many lives and too much time have been lost. Please act now.

Yours sincerely,

Mahasweta Devi, Roopa Ganguly , Sita Venkateswar, Madhusree Mukerjee

Special relief loan scheme by State Bank of India for tsunami-affected people

Published by THE DAILY TELEGRAMS, Port Blair

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

17 Jan 2005

The State Bank of India, has come out with a special relief loan for tsunami affected people of these island which will take care of the immediate financial need of the distressed families of the island due to the earthquake and tsunami. Under the special scheme which is a general purpose loan scheme, the loan amount is restricted to 12 months net annual income (12xNMI) and the rate of interest @ 2 percent below SBAR i.e. 8.25 percent instead of 12.75 percent.

According to a press note issued by the bank, the processing fee for the loan has been waived and there will no charges for processing of the loan. The loan will be available from all the branches in A&N island only subject to availability of check off facility; for offering personal loan with under noted deviations to tsunami affected salaried employees of Central / State / PSO / Private organizations (profit making) /which have been paying salary regularly during the post 24 months) of A&N Islands.

Besides the donation towards the Prime Minister's Relief Fund and Lt. Governor's Relief, the SBI branch Port Blair has also distributed relief materials to various camps in and around Port Blair. All the branches have been instructed to immediately identify the affected people in their respective service area and provide consumption loan and other loans to rehabilitate them in their respective economic activities, the press note added.

Kerala doctors stranded in Port Blair - they do not get permission to help

by MUKUNDAN C. MENON
Published by NEW INDIAN EXPRESS

Received from ABRAHAM M. GEORGE
amgeorge@optonline.net

17 Jan 2005

A six-member team of doctors, which arrived in Andaman and Nicobar Islands under an initiative of Non-Resident Keralites for taking part in the relief and rescue operations, has been denied permission to visit the worst-hit islands in the archipelago.

Despite repeated requests from the medical team comprising doctors from Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode Medical Colleges, the island administration has not given them permission to travel to the battered islands of Kachchal, Kamota and Nancowri. Following this, the doctors remained stranded in Port Blair.

``The situation in these islands are very bad. Two doctors are already in the area. They recently urged the administration to rush more doctors as the situation there is very grim. But we don't know why we're being denied permission,'' team co-ordinator Ratheesh told this website's newspaper over phone from Port Blair. The team is being sponsored by Overseas Friends, an alumni association of Anjuman Engineering College and Rescue International.

All the three organisations have been launched by Malayalis working in UAE.

``We also heard from personnel involved in rescue operations that even the dead bodies have not been removed from these islands home to many aboriginals. No one from the administration has visited these areas,'' Ratheesh said.

``We expressed our desire to work on these islands. But for some strange reason, permission is being denied,'' Ratheesh, a Dubai-based businessman who reached the isles for voluntary work, said.

``The Health Secretary after showing initial interest in our request suddenly changed his stand. We spoke to Union Minister E.Ahamed. But even his intervention has not made a change,'' he said.

Doctors in the team have already met the Lt. Governor and other senior bureaucrats in Andaman. ``But nothing positive is emerging. They have not given us a proper reply. This sparks off doubts whether they are trying to hide something,'' Ratheesh said.

The team is led by Dr Sajith Kumar, assistant professor, Thiruvananthapuram Medical College. Dr Santhosh Kumar, Sajeesh and Dinesh of Thiruvananthapuram Medical College, B Krishnan and Habeed Mohammed of Kozhikode Medical College are its members.

Meanwhile, sources told this website's newspaper that the team would be given permission to visit Kamota on Monday. It will take eight hours to reach the island. ``We need medical presence in Kamota than in other islands. The team would be given permission to visit Kachchal and Nancowri also,'' the sources said.

Sea water ingression has caused extensive damage to islands' best cultivable land

Published by THE DAILY TELEGRAMS, Port Blair

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

Port Blair, Jan 16

The Director General of ICAR, Dr Mangla Rai said here today that the cultivable area affected under tidal submergence due to tsunami in these islands is estimated to be in the range of 4500 - 5000 hectares. Addressing a press conference in CARI complex, Dr Rai who is also the Secretary, DARE, GoI, informed that 68 villages are reported to have been affected in terms of sea water ingression.

The ICAR chief said that the soil salinity has increased manifold in the low-lying coastal areas because of inundation by sea water and it has caused extensive damage to some best available cultivable land in the islands. He hinted at the possibility of drastic change in soil microflora particularly in the inundated areas. Dr Rai also indicated at the increase in the incidence of coconut rhinoceros beetle in Nicobar group of islands for which integrated pest management has to be adopted in big way.

Sounding a note of caution about the scarcity of fodder due to submergence of grazing and fodder land due to tsunami sea water ingression, the ICAR DG informed that this may lead to reduction in milk yield among diary cattle and buffalo. He said the incursion of tidal waves may also render the islands into a state of poor livestock and poultry health care status apart from the general weakness of the cattle. He informed that quite a big number of cattle and poultry population has been lost due to recent disaster. He said that as reported by the Department of AH & VS, the lives of about 5000 cattle, 33000 poultry, 25850 pigs, 7500 goat and 14 buffaloes were lost in Car Nicobar. Similarly, in South Andaman area, 78 cattle, 75 buffalo, 308 goats, 9700 poultry and 12 pigs were lost in the aftermath of the Tsunami.

Answering a question on how to combat the present situation of such an agricultural loss, Dr Rai was of the view that alternative farming system has to be worked out and diversification of the cropping system will have to be resorted to in the prevailing situation. He summed up the situation by stating that 'adversity is an opportunity to enhance productivity'.

Report on North Sentinel island

by SANJEEV MIGLANI

Received from MADHUSREE MUKHERJEE
lopchu@att.net

15 Jan 2005

One of the world's most primitive people have become more vulnerable after last month's quake and tsunami severely altered the landscape around their palm-fringed island in the Andaman and Nicobar chain, an expert said.

The fishing grounds of the Sentinelese, estimated to number between 50 and 250, have shrunk after giant waves swept large amounts of sand and debris into lagoons and filled shallow waters around the island of North Sentinel, a survey team found.

"There is a drastic change in the shape of the land," said Anstice Justin, the head of the local unit of the Anthropological Survey of India who was part of the team that went on the reconnaissance mission to North Sentinel island. "Instead of the lagoon there is a a field of rock. How will they fish there? There are no shallow waters anymore."

The Sentinelese, the most isolated of the five ancient tribes that live in the remote cluster of islands, do not fish in deep seas because unlike the other tribes they have not yet mastered the art of propelling their craft.

They use long poles to negotiate their canoes through shallow waters. Justin said he counted 32 Sentinelese, mostly adult males, a few teenagers and a couple of women, all of them naked, who came to the shore when they saw their speedboat approach "They made certain gestures, they were saying something, but it wasn't intelligible to us. But I would assume, like any human being, they would be concerned about what had happened." Justin said his team left some coconuts in the waters near the island, which the Sentinelese later retrieved.

The government said members of the other primitive tribes appeared to have largely escaped the tsunami waves because they mostly lived in jungles away from the coast. But survey teams have not yet visited all the islands or accounted for all the members of these tribes, which have been living in the area for thousands of years. Many of the tribal people are semi-nomadic and subsist on hunting with spears, bows and arrows, and by fishing and gathering fruit and roots. They still cover themselves with tree bark or leaves.

Justin said the wreckage of two old ships jutted out from one of the washed up beaches of North Sentinel island and a few new breakers had emerged in the waters in another part of the island.

"Everywhere, you could see the earth had erupted, it was as if their land had been invaded."

Unlike the other tribes who have established some kind of contact with the outside world, the Sentinelese, who are drawn from Negrito stock, have been hostile to anyone trying to get anywhere near them.

"Perhaps this change in the topography will induce changes in them, might push them up the evolution chain, if you like.

"They may shape new kinds of oars that can take them to the deep sea, they might learn propelling techniques," said Justin.

AMITAV GOSH, famous writer, visits islands and puts down his thoughts (3)

by AMITAV GOSH
Published by THE HINDU of 13 Jan 2005

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

13 Jan 2005

Amitav Ghosh, the internationally renowned novelist, visited the Andaman and Nicobar Islands recently to see for himself how the system and ordinary people have coped with the devastation caused by the tsunami of December 26. This is the third in a three-part series of special articles for THE HINDU newspaper.

At the airfield in Car Nicobar, the Director arranged a ride for us on a yellow construction truck that had been set to the task of distributing relief supplies. The truck went bouncing down the runway before turning off into a narrow road that led into a forest. Once the airstrip was behind us, it was as though we had been transported to some long-ago land, unspoiled and untouched. The road wound through a dense tropical jungle, dotted, at intervals, with groves of slender areca-palms and huts mounted on stilts. Some of these had metamorphosed into makeshift camps, sprouting awnings of plastic and tarpaulin. It was clear that the island's interior was sparsely inhabited, with the population being concentrated along the seafront.

Earlier, while the plane was making its descent, I had had a panoramic, if blurred, view of the island, in the crisp morning sunlight. No more than a few kilometres across, it was flat and low, and its interior was covered by a dense canopy of greenery. A turquoise halo surrounded its shores, where a fringe of sand had once formed an almost-continuous length of beach: this was now still mainly underwater. I saw to my surprise that many thick stands of coconut palms were still standing, even on the edge of the water.

Relatively few palms had been flattened; most remained upright and in full possession of their greenery. As for the forest, the canopy seemed almost undisturbed. All trace of habitation on the other hand, had been obliterated : the foundations of many buildings could be clearly seen, on the ground. But of the structures they had once supported, nothing remained.

Selective destruction

It was evident from above that the tsunami had been peculiarly selective in the manner of its destruction. Had the island been hit by a major cyclone, not a frond would have survived on the coconut palms and the forest canopy would have been denuded. Most human dwellings, on the other hand, would have retained their walls even if they lost their roofs. Not so in this instance: the villages along the shore were not merely damaged; they were erased. It was as if the island had been hit by a weapon devised to cause the maximum possible damage to life and property, while leaving nature largely unharmed.

We came to an intersection that was flanked by low, whitewashed buildings. This was the administrative centre of the island, the Director explained; the settlement of Malacca lay a good distance away and we would have to walk. After getting off the truck, we came to the District Library, a building of surprising size and solidity: like the surrounding offices, it was unharmed, but a medical camp, manned by the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, had sprung up on its grounds, under the shade of a spreading, moss-twined padauk tree. The Director spotted a doctor, sitting in a tent. He darted away and slipped under the tent's blue flap. "Doctor, have you heard anything about my family?" he said. "I've come because I heard some survivors had been found... "

The doctor's face froze and after a moment's silence, in a tone that was non-committal and yet not discouraging, he said: "No news has reached me - I've not heard anything... "

Salvaged goods

We continued on our way, walking past the airy bungalows of the island's top officials, with their well-tended gardens. Soon we came upon two men who were sitting by the roadside, beside an odd assortment of salvaged goods. "That's mine," said the Director, pointing to a lampstand of turned wood. " I paid a lot for it; it's made of padauk wood." There was no rancour in his voice and nor did he seem to want to reclaim the object. We walked on.

A few steps ahead the road dipped towards a large clearing fringed by thick stands of coconut palm: as with many small town maidans, there was a plaster bust of Mahatma Gandhi standing in its centre. So far on our journey from the airport we had seen no outward sign of the damage caused by the tsunami, but now we had arrived at the outer periphery of the band of destruction.

Mounds of splintered planks and other building materials lay scattered across the clearing, and the red-white-and-green fence that surrounded the bust of Mahatma Gandhi was swathed in refuse and dead coconut fronds.

Everywhere, evidence of the tsunami's reach could be seen in pools of water that had turned rank over the last few days.

At the far end of the maidan, a fire was blazing among the coconut palms. The warehouse that supplied the island with cooking gas had stood at that spot. The tsunami had swept the warehouse away, leaving the canisters exposed to the sun and a fire had ensued. Every few minutes the ground shook to the blast of exploding canisters.

Encountering Michael

Oblivious to the fire, the Director stepped away to accost a passer-by who was wheeling a loaded bicycle. Over his shoulder, he said to me: "This is Michael; he worked in my office." Michael was a sturdy, grizzled Nicobarese, dressed in green shorts and a grey shirt. Laying his hands on the bicycle's handlebars, the Director said, in Hindi: "Michael, listen - has there been any news of Madam? You know what she looks like: have you seen any trace of her?"

Michael dropped his eyes, as if in embarrassment, and answered with a tiny shake of his head. Lowering his voice, the Director continued: "And have you heard anyone speak of a girl, roaming in the jungle?" When this too failed to elicit an answer, he went on: "Michael, I need your help. Bring some men and come. I need to dig through the rubble to see if I can find anything."

Even as he was speaking, his attention shifted to the contents of the plastic bags that were hanging from Michael's handlebars. Flinching, he let go of the handlebar. "Michael!" he cried, "What is all this stuff you've picked up? You should know better than to take things from over there - they may be contaminated."

Michael hung his head and wheeled his bicycle silently away.

"They're all looting," said the director, shaking his head. "I've heard the bazaar in Port Blair has received three sackfuls of gold from the islands..."

In the clump of burning palm-trees, yet another gas canister exploded. It was close enough that we could feel the rattle of the blast in the debris under our feet; a shard of metal struck an onlooker, fortunately without injury. Oblivious to the flames, the Director hurried towards a spot where a mound of mangled household objects lay piled, having been pushed through the screen of coconut palms like dough through a sieve.

Mangled objects

"Look, that's mine," said the Director, pointing to a blue Aristocrat suitcase made of moulded plastic. It had been hacked open with a sharp-bladed instrument and its contents were gone. The Director picked it up and shook it. "I saw it the last time I was here," he said. "I t was already empty. Everything had been looted." His eyes moved over to a steel trunk, lying nearby. "That's mine too. Go and look." Stepping over I saw that the trunk's lock had been forced open. On the side, written in large black letters, was the Director's name and designation.

"You see," the Director said, as if in vindication. "Everything I've been telling you is true. These things were all mine."

Research lost

A short distance away a wooden cabinet lay overturned, and heaps of paper could be seen spilling out of its belly. The Director beckoned to me. "See - there are all the records from my office. Thirteen years of research: all gone." We went to kneel beside the cabinet and I saw that the papers were mimeographed data sheets, with the letterhead of the Malaria Research Centre imprinted on top.

Somewhere among the papers I spotted some old photographs. Somehow it was a matter of great relief to me to come upon some retrievable memento and I was quick to draw the Director's attention to the pictures. On examination it turned out that most of the pictures had been defaced by the water, but I found one where he, the Director, could clearly be seen, standing among a group of people. I held it out to him and he took it with an indifferent shrug. "That photo was taken at the air base, I remember." He let go and it fluttered into a puddle of stinking water.

"Don't you want to keep it?" I said, in astonishment.

"No," he said simply. "It means nothing. These are just work pictures."

Slides!

Then suddenly his eyes lit up. "Look," he said, "my slides... " A drawer had come open, shaking loose several decks of white-rimmed photographic slides.

Most were sodden with water, but some were dry and had preserved their mages. To my untrained eyes, the pictures appeared to be of bacteria, hugely magnified by the lens of a microscope. The Director sorted quickly through the slides and chose a dozen or so. Close at hand there lay a roll of unused plastic bags that had been washed out of a shop and dried by the sun. Peeling off one of these bags, he placed the slides carefully inside before fastening his fingers on them.

"Your home must have been nearby?" I said.

"No," came the answer. "The wave carried these things right out of the town.

My house is still a kilometre away, over there."

Power of tsunami

I had imagined that his possessions had ended up in the same place because his house was nearby: this was an indication of how little I understood of the power of the surge. Its strength was such that it had tossed the Director's house aside, picked up his household goods, bundled them together and punched them through a kilometre-wide expanse of dense habitation.

The location the Director had pointed to was on the far side of the burning coconut palms; it was evident that to get there we would have to pass quite close to the fire, which was now spreading rapidly. We set off almost at a run, and soon came to a point where our path was blocked by a fallen tree. He clambered over, hanging on to his slides and I followed. The fire was now less than a hundred metres to our right and as I was climbing over there was another detonation, followed by a crackling, whooshing sound. I fell quickly to the ground and shut my eyes. When next I looked up, the Director was still standing, looking down at me with puzzled impatience. "Come on, come on - that's where we have to go: over there."

When I rose to my feet I had my first glimpse of the seafront where the town of Malacca had once stood: till now it had been largely screened off from view by the coconut palms. On a stretch of land a couple of kilometres long, there were now only five structures still standing: the staring, skull-like shell of a school that had lost all its doors and windows; a neatly whitewashed bungalow; an arched gateway that had the words `Rajiv Gandhi Memorial Park' painted on it; a small, miraculously unharmed Murugan temple, right beside the sea; and lastly the skeleton of a church, with a row of parallel arches rising from the rubble like the bleached ribs of a dead animal.

Life-saver

This was the structure that had saved the life of the Director's son. The palms along the seafront were undamaged and upright, their fronds intact, but the other trees on the site had lost all their leaves and a couple had buses, cars and sheets of corrugated iron wrapped around their trunks. If not for the tree-trunks and the waving palms, the first visual analogy to suggest itself would have been Hiroshima after the bomb: the resemblance lay not just in the destruction but also in the discernible directionality of the blast. But there the parallel ended for the sky here was a cloudless blue and there were no wisps of smoke rising from the ruins.

The Director led the way across the debris as if he were following a route imprinted in memory, a familiar map of streets and lanes. Despite a stiff breeze, blowing in from the sea, an odour of death flowed over the site, not evenly, but in whirls and eddies, sometimes growing so powerful as to indicate the presence of a yet-undiscovered body. Stray dogs, rooting in the ruins, looked up as though to express their surprise at the sight of human beings who were still ambient and on their feet.

Home that was

We came to a point where a rectangular platform of cement shone brightly under the sun. The Director stepped up to it and placed his feet in the middle. "This was my house," he said. "Only the foundation was concrete. The rest was wood. My wife used to say that she had moved from a white house to a log cabin. You see, she was from an affluent family; she grew up in a bungalow with an air-conditioner. She used to teach English in a school here, but she always wanted to leave. I applied many times, but the transfer never came." He paused, thinking back. For much of the time that we had been together, his voice had carried a note of sharp but undirected annoyance; now it softened. "There was so much she could have achieved," he said. "I was never able to give her the opportunity."

I reached out to touch his arm but he shook my hand brusquely away; he was not the kind of man who takes kindly to expressions of sympathy; I could tell from his demeanour that he was accustomed to adversity and had invented many rules for dealing with it. The emotion he felt for his family he had rarely expressed; he had hoarded it inside himself, in the way a squirrel gathers food for the winter: loathe to spend it in his hectic middle years, he had put it away to be savoured when there was a greater sense of ease in his life, at a time when his battles were past and he could give his hoarded love his full attention. He had never dreamt - and who could? - that one bright December day, soon after dawn, it would be stolen, unsavoured, by the sea.

I began to walk towards the gently lapping waves, no more than a hundred metres away. The Director took fright at this and called me back: "Don't go that way, the tide is coming in. It's time to leave."

Yellow paint box

I turned to follow him and we were heading back towards the blazing palms, when he stopped to point to a yellow paint box, peeping out of the rubble. "That belonged to Vineeta, my daughter," he said, and the flatness of his voice was harder to listen to than an outburst would have been. "She loved to paint; she was very good at it. She was even given a prize, from Hyderabad."

I had expected that he would stoop to pick up the box, but instead he turned away and walked on, gripping his bag of slides. "Wait!" I cried. "Don't you want to take the box?"

"No," he said vehemently, shaking his head. "What good will it do? What will it give back?" He stopped to look at me over the rim of his glasses. "Do you know what happened the last time I was here? Someone had found my daughter's schoolbag and saved it for me. It was handed to me, like a card. It was the worst thing I could have seen. It was unbearable."

He started to walk off again. Unable to restrain myself, I called out after him: "Are you sure you don't want it - the paint box?"

Without looking around he said: "Yes, I am sure."

I stood amazed as he walked off towards the blazing fire, with his slides still folded in his grip: how was it possible that the only memento he had chosen to retrieve were those magnified images? As a husband, a father, a human being, it was impossible not to wonder: what would I have done? what would I have felt? what would I have chosen to keep of the past? The truth is that nobody can know, except in the extremity of that moment, and then the choice is not a choice at all, but an expression of the innermost sovereignty of the self, which decides because nothing now remains to cloud its vision.

In the manner of his choosing there was not a particle of hesitation, not the faintest glimmer of a doubt. Was it perhaps that in this moment of utter desolation there was some comfort in the knowledge of an impersonal effort? Could it be that he was seeking refuge in the one aspect of his existence that could not be erased by an act of nature? Or was there some consolation in the very lack of immediacy - did the value of those slides lie precisely in their exclusion from the unendurable pain of his loss? Whatever the reason, his mind had fixed upon a set of objects that derived their meaning from the part of his life that was lived in thought and contemplation.

There are times when words seem futile, and to no one more so than a writer. At these moments it seems that nothing is of value other than to act and to intervene in the course of events: to think, to reflect, to write seem trivial and wasteful. But the life of the mind takes many forms and after the day had passed I understood that in the manner of his choosing, the Director had mounted the most singular, the most powerful defence of it that I would ever witness.

Amitav Ghosh

Situation report on the indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands

by MANISH CHANDI, Port Blair

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

13 Jan 2005

The archipelagos of the Andaman & Nicobar Islands have suffered greatly during the recent earth quakes and the subsequent tsunami. This is more so in the Nicobar Islands than in the Andaman group of islands, given their proximity to the island of Sumatra and the epicenter of the earthquakes. The Islands have gone through submergence and upheaval of landmasses giving rise to changes in terrestrial and marine environments of the islands. The indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman Islands are the few remaining Great Andamanese on Strait Island, Onge of Little Andaman Island, the Jarawa of South & Middle Andaman Islands, and the Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island. All of these groups in contact with the A&N administration (apart from the Sentinelese who continue to be resistive and hold their own ground) have claimed to have run to higher ground with the beginning of the earthquakes.

This they claim is orally transmitted generational knowledge given past events in their historical experience which has taught them the nuances of survival in their Island environment. Apart from running to higher ground, I was even informed of an act that was perpetrated during this situation when all Jarawa with bows and arrows struck the ground with these shafts to reduce the intensity of the earthquake and increase chances of their survival on higher ground.

The Great Andamanese who number about 40 people are the remnants of former larger groups of tribes on the Andaman Islands who have been resettled by the Govt. of India since 1956 on Strait Island. Apart for the few, who are employed in various Govt. departments, the rest of them were on their Island on the 26th of December. They had moved to a hill adjacent to their settlement and remained there until they were evacuated to Port Blair to ensure their safety. The entire group is at present at Port Blair at the Adi basera - a rest station specifically made for the indigenous tribes during their infrequent visits to Port Blair.

The Onge live at Dugong Creek in the north and South Bay on Little Andaman Island. When the earthquakes struck they had moved to higher ground deep inside their forest and escaped the fury of the waves that entered the settlements. South Bay has been badly damaged though Dugong creek is inundated but not as badly devastated. One Onge woman and her newborn child are at Port Blair's GB Pant Hospital recuperating from childbirth.

The Jarawa reserve which extends along the West Coast of South and Middle Andaman Islands had also run inland; moreover this being the season to hunt wild boar most of them were inland deep in the tropical evergreen jungle that is common throughout their habitat. At present quite a few Jarawa tribe's people have assembled together near the southern most extremity of the reserve close to Tirur settlement at a large communal hut. This has encouraged poachers from the Wandoor and Kadamtala regions who have already arrived from and returned back to the reserve for wild Boar and spotted deer. One of the tsunami-affected families is supplementing their income with wild boar from the Jarawa reserve at Wandoor village. Apparently those Jarawa who did not strike the ground with arrow shafts or metal, have been temporarily restricted from communing with the regrouped persons and these persons are near Tirur village. The Andaman Trunk Road that runs through the reserve has not been severely damaged excepting for broken culvert retaining walls and a landslide at 2 places. Vehicular traffic is restricted to small cars and even motorbikes all those whom I met were allowed to travel without a police escort.

The Sentinelese have shown their resilience and do not seem to have faced much problems during the Tsunami events and even shot arrows at a naval Helicopter on patrol which had descended to check on their well being. The Island of North Sentinel has seen an upheaval of the landmass especially the surrounding coral reef and has thus increased terra firma of the island but damaging a once pristine reef.

The Nicobar islanders have been the worst sufferers of these events on and after December 26th. Initial reports were largely arriving from Car Nicobar Island, which is the district headquarters and also an airbase. This saw the attention of the world focus around here while other regions were neglected for about 4 days before rescue missions were in place.

Even so the number of dead and missing persons continue to mount given the inaccessibility of most regions. There has been considerable submergence in this region with coastlines having changed with massive ingress of the sea and the submergence of all coastal flat lands. The latest survivor has come out from Great Nicobar Island (in the South Nicobars) after 2 weeks floating on a log in a morass of fallen trees and debris that engulfed most of the devastated coastal forest regions of Great Nicobar Island. Pulomilo Island that was once ensconced within Little Nicobar Island is now submerged except for a small hilltop that housed a marine navigational beacon; it is a similar case with Chowra Island, a large portion of the Island being submerged and only a few survivors remain. The western coasts of Great and Little Nicobar have been partially submerged wiping out communities who once inhabited the region.

The Shompen who live inland and deep in the forest (of Great Nicobar) have so far known not to have suffered any causalities though personnel from the Tribal welfare department have left for Campbell Bay to assess the situation. A Helicopter that hovered above an active settlement of some Shompen scared the inhabitants away and returned to report on their well being.

In the Central Nicobars the Islands of Trinket and Katchal have split with wide cracks and many inhabitants are presumed dead. At Camorta island relief camps are present in many places catering to the displaced and affected inhabitants. The evacuees from Chowra and Car Nicobar Island (in the northern Nicobars) are at camps at Port Blair and on Car Nicobar Island. Those survivors from the southern Nicobars are at Campbell bay on Great Nicobar Island.

A lot of islanders are known to be living in the jungle of Car Nicobar; similarly with recent evacuations it is presumed that many other survivors are still marooned in the thickly forested regions of Great and Little Nicobar Islands. The Tsunami and earthquakes have caused a loss of lives to such an extent that only a few survivors of a few tribal groups remain; this is the case largely from Chowra and from the southern Nicobars. Despite this many Car Nicobarese have begun to return from Port Blair to Car Nicobar, and have been expressing the view of a need to restart their lives afresh and to also restrict ownership of space on their islands compared to the uncontrolled immigration of the past.

One of future concerns is the ability of fragmented communities especially of Great and Little Nicobar islands, Chowra Island, to be reoccupy their former space; apart from submerged regions, existing landscapes are largely hilly and thickly forested slopes of considerable gradients. Ariel pictures taken during rescue and search missions show a devastated landscape devoid of all trees that are now floating in muddy water with a complete transformation of topography and contour of Island coastlines. Given the fact that the traditional lifestyle of horticulture will take a long while to resume, in the event of complete damage, an alternative to this form of livelihood will be necessary to adopt in the interim period. This of course is a concern envisaged from outside of the community and it will be advisable to wait for such planning to take place by residents themselves. It would be pertinent to give the option of first choice to the remaining residents during the resettlement process after which other administrative and settlement constructions can be planned for these regions. This will take a while given the situation at present where all of the communities in the Nicobar archipelago are at present in relief camps spread form Port Blair to Great Nicobar in the southern extremity. Another danger that is present through this relief operation is the large number of NGO's present in the islands now and from those outside - all of whom are keen to be part of the rehabilitation process. Also the Administration is under pressure form various groups genuine and otherwise in terms of compensation for damages caused by this event. It would be wise to give time its due and a consolidative approach on the part of the Administration, NGO's toward forming a strategy that is envisaged by the Nicobar Tribal council for their future well being.

Letter regarding tribal land in the Central Nicobars

by SAMIR ACHARYA
Published by SANE (Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology)

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

13 Jan 2005

to
Mr. Kunwar Singh, Chairman
National Commission for Scheduled Tribes
Government of India
5th Floor, Lok Nayak Bhawan, Khan Market,
New Delhi - 110003

Dear Sir,

May I invite your kind attention to the urgent need of protecting the tribal land in the Nancowrie group of islands? The tribals there had sent an appeal to the Hon'ble Lt. Governor, Andaman and Nicobar Islands on 4th January, 2005 (copy enclosed for your ready reference). Their concern has now led to the creation of a fear psychosis that needs immediate attention.

The tribals in Katchal Island have lost a tremendous amount of land and livelihood options. On this tribal island 500 hectares of land was taken over by the Rubber Board and a rubber plantation was established without denotifying the land. The plantation was then taken over by the Andaman and Nicobar Forest and Plantation Corporation Ltd. The Hon'ble Supreme Court of India, in May, 2002, had ordered that all plantations on forest land should be cut down. Their Lordships had also ordered the dissolution of the Andaman and Nicobar Forest and Plantation Corporation. Neither order has been complied with till date. The plantation has also resulted in an influx of illegal non-tribals into the island. Widespread discontent among the tribals

found expression in a public interest litigation filed before the Hon'ble Calcutta High Court by the Nicobar Youth Association. As a result of this case, the Lt. Governor ordered the deportation of all illegal entrants. But when 50 illegals from Teressa Island were arrested, produced before the court and granted bail, the Lt. Governor accompanied by the Chief Secretary and our Member of Parliament flew down to Car Nicobar and announced issue of permits to them to legalise their presence on tribal land.

We urge you to kindly use the enormous prestige of your office to persuade the Government of India to direct the Administration to i. cut down the rubber plantation and hand over the timber duly treated to the local community for use in reconstruction of their destroyed huts ii. return the clear-felled plantation land to the local community to compensate for the land lost in the tsunami; and iii. to evict all non-tribal encroachers and to deposit all non-tribals not holding a pass. We also urge you to kindly request the Administration to issue Tribal Passes in consultation with the Tribal Council so that their wish is respected and no one is forced on the community against their wish.

Thanking you,
Yours sincerely,

Samir Acharya

AMITAV GOSH, famous writer, visits islands and puts down his thoughts (2)

by AMITAV GOSH
Published by THE HINDU of 12 Jan 2005,

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

12 Jan 2005

Amitav Ghosh, the internationally renowned novelist, visited the Andaman and Nicobar Islands recently to see for himself how the system and ordinary people have coped with the devastation caused by the tsunami of December 26. This is the fi rst in a three-part series of special articles for THE HINDU newspaper.

Are supplies really available aplenty, throughout the Andaman and Nicobar Islands? The tale told in the relief camps is of course exactly the opposite of that which echoes out of the lairs of officialdom. Most of the refugees had to wait several days before they were evacuated. Forgotten in their far-flung islands, they listened to radio broadcasts that told them their nation was rushing aid to Sri Lanka and had refused all outside help as unnecessary: for the thirsty and hungry there was little consolation in the thought that these measures might help their country establish itself as a superpower. In Campbell Bay, according to several reports, refugees were moved to such fury by the indifference of the local officials that that they assaulted an officer who was found ushering in the New Year with a feast. Accounts of this incident, confirmed by several sources in the Coast Guard and the police, were characteristically denied by the civil authorities.

In Port Blair, relief camps are the main sources of aid and sustenance for the refugees. These are all sustained by private initiatives: they are staffed by volunteers from local youth groups, religious foundations and so on, and their supplies are provided by local shopkeepers, businessmen and citizens' organisations. I met with the organisers of several relief camps and they were unanimous in stating that they had received no aid whatsoever from the government, apart from some water. They knew that people on the mainland were eager to help and that a great deal of money had been raised.

None of these funds had reached them; presumably they had met the same bottlenecks of distribution as the supplies that were lying piled on the runways. That it should be possible for the people of a small town like Port Blair to provide relief to so many refugees is the bright side of this dismal story: it is proof, if any were needed, that the development of civil society in India has far outpaced the institutions of state and the personnel who staff them.

Armed forces' attitude

The attitude of the armed forces is not the same as that of the civilian authorities. At all levels of the chain of command, from Lt. Gen. B.S. Thakur, the commanding officer in Port Blair, to the jawans who are combing through the ruins of Car Nicobar, there is an urgency, a diligence and an openness that is in striking contrast to the stance of the civilian personnel. Indeed, the feats performed by some units speak of an exemplary dedication to duty. Consider for example the case of Wing Commander B.S.K. Kumar, a helicopter pilot at the Car Nicobar air base. On December 26, he was asleep when the earthquake first made itself felt: his quarters were a mere 30 metres from the sea. Not only did he manage to outrun the tsunami, with his wife and child, he was airborne within 10 minutes of the first wave. In the course of the day he winched up some 60 stranded people and evacuated another 240.

His colleague, Wing Commander Maheshwari, woke too late to escape the wave. As the waters rose, he was forced to retreat to the roof of his building with his wife and daughter. Along with 29 other people, he fought for his footing on the roof until all were swept off. He managed to make his way to land, but was separated from his wife and child: two hours passed before they were found, clinging to the trunk of a tree. Of the 29 people on that roof, only six survived. And yet, despite the ordeal, Wing Commander Maheshwari flew several sorties that day.

Bureaucratic insensitivity

Considering the diligence of the armed forces and the enthusiasm and generosity of ordinary citizens, how is the attitude of the island's civilian administration to be accounted for? The answer is simple: a lack of democracy and popular empowerment. As a Union Territory, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have no legislature and thus no elected representatives with any clout apart from a single Member of Parliament. Elsewhere in India, in any situation of crisis, officials have to answer to legislators at every level: a failure to act would result in their being hounded by legislators and harried by trade unions, student groups and the like. As Amartya Sen has shown in his work on famines, these mechanisms are essential to the proper distribution of resources in any situation of extreme scarcity: in effect, the political system serves as a means by which demands are articulated. The media similarly serve to create flows of information.

These are precisely the mechanisms that are absent in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands: there are no elected representatives to speak for the people and the media have been excluded from large swathes of territory. It is not for no reason that on the mainland, where these mechanisms do exist, the attitude of administrators in the affected districts has been more sensitive to the needs of the victims and substantially more open to the oversight of the press and to offers of help from other parts of the country.

It is common for civil servants to complain of the perils of political interference: the situation on the islands is proof that in the absence of vigorous oversight many (although certainly not all) officials will revert to the indifference and inertia that are the natural condition of any bureaucracy.

Clearly the Central Government is aware that there is a problem, for the relief operation was restructured on January 2, reportedly at the personal intervention of Sonia Gandhi. What is more, several senior members of the ruling party have been dispatched to the outlying islands, not just for token visits, but to make sure that the supplies are properly distributed.

These are welcome first steps, but it is essential that the Central Government moves quickly to create a more responsive and efficient disaster relief operation in this region not just for the management of this disaster, but for the long term. For if anything can be said with any certainty, it is that the tsunami will not be the last seismic upheaval to shake the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

In 1991, after lying dormant for 200 years, the volcano of Barren Island, off the coast of the Andamans, became active again: there are reports that it erupted again around the time of the earthquake of December 26. On September 14, 2002, there was a 6.5 magnitude earthquake near Diglipur in North Andaman Island: now there are unconfirmed reports of a minor eruption in the same area. The signs are clear: no one can say the Earth has not provided warnings of its intent.

In Port Blair I found that the tsunami's effects on the outlying islands could only be guessed at. The refugees in the camps spoke of apocalyptic devastation and tens of thousands dead; the authorities' estimates were much more modest. There were few, if any, reliable independent assessments, for the civil authorities had decided that no journalists or other `outsiders' were to be allowed to travel to the outlying islands. The reasons given were those of the battlefield: too many resources would be spent on their protection. But there was no battle under way in the islands and the dangers of the tsunami were long past. Public ferry and steamer services linking Port Blair to the outer islands were in operation and had plenty of room for paying passengers. And yet journalists, Indian and foreign, who attempted to board these ships were forcibly dragged off.

Off to Car Nicobar

On January 1, 2005, there was an unexpected parting in this curtain of exclusion. The reason was that a couple of senior members of the ruling party had come to Port Blair with the intent of travelling farther afield. It was quickly made known that an Air Force plane would be provided to take the Ministers, and a retinue of journalists, to the island of Car Nicobar the next day. This island, which is positioned halfway between the Andaman and Nicobar chains, is home to some 30,000 people: it also houses an air base, which makes it something of a hub in relation to the more southerly islands.

Hoping to get on this plane, I duly presented myself at the airport only to find that a great many others had arrived with the same expectation. As always in such situations, there was considerable confusion about who would get on. After the Ministers had boarded, a minor melee ensued at the foot of the ramp that led to the plane's capacious belly. Knowing that I stood little chance of prevailing in this contest, I had almost resigned myself to being left behind when a young man in a blue uniform tapped my elbow and pointed across the airfield. "You want to go to Car Nicobar? That plane over there is carrying relief supplies. Just go and sit down. No one will say anything."

I sought no explanation for this unsolicited act of consideration: it seemed typical of the general goodwill of the military personnel I had encountered on the islands. As if on tiptoe I walked across the tarmac and up the ramp. The plane was a twin-engined Soviet-era AN 26, rusty but dependable, and its capacious fuselage was lined with folding benches. The round portholes that pierced its sides were like eyes that had grown rheumy with age; time had sandpapered the panes of glass so that they were almost opaque. The cargo area was packed with mattresses, folding beds, cases of mineral water and sacks of food, all covered with a net of webbing. There were some half dozen men inside, sitting on the benches with their feet planted askew beside the mass of supplies.

Angry and irascible I seated myself in the only available space, beside a short, portly man with thick glasses and well-oiled, curly hair. He was dressed in a stiffly ironed brown safari suit and he had an air of irascibility that spoke of a surfeit of time spent in filing papers and running offices. He was muttering angrily when I came aboard: "What do those people care? What have they ever done to help anyone... ?" Of all the people on that plane he was perhaps the last I would have chosen to sit beside: I was keen to make myself as inconspicuous as possible while he seemed determined to draw attention to himself. It could only be a matter of minutes I thought, before the airmen evicted him.Inexplicably, they did not.

When the engines started up, my neighbour turned his attention to me. "These big people think they are so great, but what help have they given?" I assumed this to be a general expression of disgust, of the kind that is to be heard on every train and bus in the country. But then he added suddenly: "Let them go through what I have gone through. Let them suffer, then they would see... "

This hit me with the force of a shock: his well-laundered safari suit, his air of almost-comical self-importance, his irascibility - there was nothing about him that bespoke the victim. But I understood now why the airmen had ignored his rants; they knew something about him that I did not and this was their way of showing compassion.

In the meanwhile the tirade continued: "If those politicians had suffered as I have, what would they do? This is the question I want to ask."

I winced to think of my first response to his mutterings. "What exactly has happened?" I asked. "Tell me."

The Director's Story

He did not want his name, so I shall call him `The Director'. This indeed was his official title: he had been posted to the island of Car Nicobar in 1991, as the Director of the island's Malaria Research Centre and had lived there ever since. He was originally from Puri, in Orissa, and had been trained at the University of Berhampore. During his tenure in Car Nicobar he had married and had two children: a son who was now 13, and a 10-year-old daughter. His home was in Malacca - the seafront township I'd heard about in the camps - and his office was just a few minutes' walk from where he lived. In this office he had accumulated a great wealth of epidemiological knowledge. Car Nicobar had once been rife with malaria, he told me. In an island with a population of just 30,000, the annual incidence had been as high as 3810, even as recently as 1989. But during his tenure he had succeeded in bringing the rate down to a fraction of this number. It was clear, from the readiness with which he quoted the figures, that he was immensely - and justly - proud of what he had achieved during his stay on the island.

On December 25, 2004, the Director was in Port Blair, on his way to New Delhi. Since he was travelling for official reasons, he had left his family in Malacca. He spent the night of December 25 in the Haddo Circuit House, which stands close to the water. On the morning of the 26th he was woken by the shaking of his bed. He stepped off to find the floor heaving and realised that an earthquake had hit the town. As he was running out of the building, his mobile phone rang. Glancing quickly at the screen, he saw that his wife was calling from Malacca. He guessed that the earthquake had struck Car Nicobar too but he was not unduly alarmed. Tremors were frequently felt on the island and he thought his wife would be able to cope. The Guest House in the meanwhile was still shaking and there was no time to talk.

He cut off the call and ran outside; he would phone back later, he decided, once the tremors stopped. He waited out the earthquake outside and when the ground was still at last, he hit the call button on his phone. There was no answer and he wondered if the network was down. But he had little time to think about the matter because a strange phenomenon had suddenly begun to manifest itself before him: the water in the harbour had begun to rise, very rapidly, and the anchored ships seemed to be swirling about in the grip of an unseen hand. Along with everyone else he ran to higher ground.

Surge of water

The islands of the Andaman chain rise steeply out of the sea and the harbour and waterfront of Port Blair are sheltered by a network of winding fjords and inlets. Such is the lay of the land that the turbulence that radiated outwards from the earthquake's epicentre, manifested itself here not as an onrushing wall of water, but as a surge in the water level. Although this caused a good deal of alarm, the damage was not severe.

It was not long, however, before it occurred to the Director that the incoming swell in Port Blair's harbour might have taken a different form elsewhere. The Nicobar islands do not have the high elevations of their northern neighbours, the Andamans. They are low-lying islands for the most part, and some like Car Nicobar stand no more than a few metres above sea level at their highest point. Already anxious, the Director became frantic when word of the tsunami trickled down to the waterfront, from the naval offices further up the slope.

Malacca hit

The Director knew of a government office in Car Nicobar that had a satellite phone. He dialled the number again and again: it was either busy or there was no answer. When at last he got through, the voice at the other end told him, with some reluctance, that Malacca had been badly hit. It was known that there were some survivors, but as for his family, there was no word.

The Director kept calling, and in the afternoon he learnt that his 13-year-old son had been found clinging to the rafters of a church, some 200 metres behind their house. Arrangements were made to bring the boy to the phone and the Director was able to speak to him directly later that night.

He learnt from his son that the family had been in the bedroom when the earthquake started. A short while later, a terrifying sound from the direction of the sea had driven the three of them into the drawing room. The boy had kept running, right into the kitchen. The house was built of wood, on a cement foundation. When the wave hit, the house dissolved into splinters and the boy was carried away as if on a wind. Flailing his arms, he managed to take hold of something that seemed to be fixed to the earth.

Through wave after wave he managed to keep his grip. When the water receded he saw that he was holding on to the only upright structure within a radius of several hundred metres: of the township there was nothing left but a deep crust of wreckage.

"And your mother and sister?" the Director had asked.

"Baba, they just disappeared... " And now for the first time, the boy began to cry, and the Director's heart broke because he knew his son was crying because he thought he would be scolded and blamed for what had happened.

Timid, brave boy

"I was strict with him sir," the Director said, his voice trailing off. "I am a strict man; that is my nature. But I must say he is a brave boy; a very brave boy."

Having spent 13 years on the island, the Director was well acquainted with the local administration and the officers on the air base. Through their intervention he was able to get on a flight the very next day. He spent the day searching through the rubble; he found many possessions, but no trace of his daughter or his wife. He came back to Port Blair with his son the same evening and the two of them moved in with some friends. Every day since then he'd been trying to go back, to find out what had become of his wife and daughter but the flights had been closed - until this one.

"Tell me," he said, his voice becoming uncharacteristically soft. "What do you think: is there any hope?"

It took me a moment to collect my wits. "Of course there is hope," I said. "There is always hope. They could have been swept ashore on another part of the island."

He nodded. "We will see. I hope I will find out today, in Malacca."

With some hesitation I asked if it would be all right if I came with him. He answered with a prompt nod. "You can come."

I had the impression that he had been dreading the lonely search that lay ahead and would be glad of some company. "All right then," I said. "I will."

Amitav Ghosh

Global warming and rising sea levels will affect the Nicobar islands

by MADHUSREE MUKHERJEE
lopchu@att.net

12 Jan 2005

Sadly I think the warning about global warming causing an upcreep of the sea should be taken seriously. It isn't just the slow rise of the sea, but also that global warming will cause more frequent and violent storms, which means storm surges--segments of ocean uplifted by the low-pressure core of a storm and moved onto land. (Like the Orissa tidal wave.) What this all means about rebuilding for the battered Nicobarese I don't know. It looks like not only should people worry about how far they are from the shore (CRZ), but how high they are

AMITAV GOSH, famous writer, visits islands and puts down his thoughts (1)

by AMITAV GOSH
Published by THE HINDU of 11 Jan 2005,

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

11 Jan 2005

Amitav Ghosh, the internationally renowned novelist, visited the Andaman and Nicobar Islands recently to see for himself how the system and ordinary people have coped with the devastation caused by the tsunami of December 26. This is the fi rst in a three-part series of special articles for THE HINDU newspaper.

Overlapping faults

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are one of those quadrants of the globe where political and geological fault lines run on parallel courses. Politically the islands are Union Territories, ruled directly from New Delhi, but geologically they stand just beyond the edge of the Indian tectonic plate. Stretching through 700 kilometres of the Bay of Bengal, they are held aloft by a range of undersea mountains that stands guard over the abyssal deep of the Sunda trench. Of the 572 islands, only 36 are inhabited: `the Andamans' is the name given to the northern part of the archipelago while `the Nicobars' lie to the south. At their uppermost point, the Andamans are just a few dozen miles from Burma's Coco Islands, infamous for their prisons, while the southernmost edge of the Nicobars is only a couple of hundred kilometres from the ever-restless region of Aceh. This part of the chain is so positioned that the tsunami of December 26, 2004 hit it just minutes after the coastline of northern Sumatra.

Despite the hundreds of kilometres of water that separate the Andamans from the Indian mainland, many of the relief camps in Port Blair, the islands' capital city, have the appearance of miniaturised portraits of the nation. Only a small percentage of their inmates are indigenous to the islands; the others are settlers from different parts of the mainland: Bengal, Orissa, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh. If this comes as a surprise, it is only because the identity of the islands - and indeed the alibi for the present form of their rule - lies in an administrative conception of the `primitive' that dates back to the British Raj. The idea that these islands are somehow synonymous with backwardness is energetically promoted in today's Port Blair. Hoardings depicting naked `primitives' line the streets, and I heard of a sign that instructs onlookers to `Love Your Primitive Tribe.'

In most parts of the mainland, these images would long since have been defaced or torn down, for the sheer offensiveness of their depictions: not so on these islands which are more a projection of India than a part of its body politic; as with many colonies, they represent a distended and compressed version of the mother country, in its weaknesses and strengths, its aspirations and failings. Over the last two weeks, both the fault lines that underlie the islands seem suddenly to have been set in motion: it is as if the hurried history of an emergent nation had collided here with the deep time of geology.

The mainland settlers in the camps are almost unanimous in describing themselves as having come to the islands in search of land and opportunity. Listening to their stories it is easy to believe that most of them found what they were looking for: here, in this far-flung chain of islands, tens of thousands of settlers were able to make their way out of poverty, into the ranks of the country's expanding middle class. But on the morning of December 26, this hard-won betterment became a potent source of vulnerability. For to be middle-class, in India or anywhere else, is to be kept afloat on a life-raft of paper: identity cards, licences, ration cards, school certificates, cheque books, certificates of life insurance and receipts for fixed deposits.

It was the particular nature of this disaster that it targeted not just the physical being of the victims but also the proof of the survivors' identities. An earthquake would have left remnants to rummage through; floods and hurricanes would have allowed time for survivors to safeguard their essential documents on their person. The tsunami, in the suddenness of its onslaught allowed for no preparations: not only did it destroy the survivors' homes and decimate their families; it also robbed them of all the evidentiary traces of their place in the world.

On January 1, 2005, I went to visit the Nirmala School Camp in Port Blair. The camp, like the school in which it is housed, is run by the Catholic Church and it is presided over by a mild-mannered young priest by the name of Father Johnson. On the morning of my visit Father Johnson was at the centre of an angry altercation. The refugees had spent the last three days waiting anxiously in the camp, and in that time no one had asked them where they wanted to go or when; none of them had any idea of what was to become of them and the sense of being adrift had brought them to the end of their tether. The issue was neither deprivation nor hardship - there was enough food and they had all the clothes they needed - it was the uncertainty that was intolerable. In the absence of any other figure of authority they had laid siege to Father Johnson: when would they be allowed to move on? Where would they be going?

Father Johnson could give them no answers for he was, in his own way, just as helpless as they were. The officials in charge of the relief effort had told him nothing about their plans for the refugees. Now time was running out: the schools in which the camps were located were to re-open on January 3. With the date almost at hand, Father Johnson had no idea how he was going to manage his students with more than 1600 refugees camping on the grounds.

Reclaiming identity

Realising at last that Father Johnson knew no more than they did, the inmates reduced their demands to a single, modest query: could they be provided with some paper and a few pens? No sooner had this request been met than another uproar broke out: those who'd been given possession of pens and paper now became the centre of the siege. Crowding together, people began to push and jostle, clamouring to have their names written down. Identity was now no more than a matter of assertion and nothing seemed to matter more than to create a trail of paper. On this depended the eventual reclamation of a life.

Standing on the edges of the crowd was a stocky, thirty-year-old man by the name of Obed Tara. He was, he told me, from the island of Car Nicobar, a member of an indigenous group whose affiliations, in language and ethnicity, lie with the Malay peoples to the east. But he himself was a Naik in the 10th Madras regiment of the Indian army and was fluent in Hindi. On December 10 he had set off from Calcutta, where his unit was currently stationed, in order to travel to Car Nicobar. Like most Nicobarese people, he was a Christian, a member of the Anglican Church of North India, and he'd been looking forward to celebrating Christmas at home. But this year there was something else to look forward to as well: he was to be married on the first day of the New Year (the very day of our conversation).

On December 26, despite the celebrations and merry-making of the night before, Obed Tara, like most members of his extended family, rose early in order to attend a Boxing Day service at their church. Their house was in the seafront settlement of Malacca, just a few hundred metres from the water. Their neighbourhood was the commercial heart of the township, and their house was surrounded by shops and godowns. They were themselves a part of the market's bustle; they owned a Maruti Omni and operated a long-distance phone booth in their house. In other words, theirs' was a family that had been swept into the middle-class by the commercial opportunities of the last decade.

Day of Tsunami

That morning, as the family was gathering outside the house, the ground began to heave with a violence that none of them had ever experienced before; it shook so hard that it was impossible to stand still and they were forced to throw themselves on the ground. Then the ground cracked and fountains of mud-brown water came geysering out of these fissures. Like all the islanders, Obed Tara was accustomed to tremors in the earth, but neither he nor anyone else there had ever seen anything like this before. It took a while before the ground was still enough to regain a footing and no sooner had he risen to his feet than he heard a wild, roaring sound. Looking seawards he saw a wall of water advancing towards his house. Gathering his relatives, he began to run.

By the time he looked back, his house, and the neighbourhood in which it stood, had vanished under the waves: two elderly members of the family were lost and everything they possessed was gone, the car, the phone booth, the house. The family spent a couple of nights in the island's interior and afterwards the elders deputed him to go to Port Blair to see what he could secure for them by way of relief and supplies. By the time Obed Tara finished telling me this story, there was a catch in his voice, and he was swallowing convulsively to keep from sobbing. I asked him: "Why don't you go to the army offices and tell them who you are? I am sure they will do what they can to help you."

He shook his head, as if to indicate that he had considered and dismissed this thought many times over. "The sea took my uniform, my ration card, my service card, my tribal papers; it took everything," he said. "I can't prove who I am. Why should they believe me?"

He led me to the far side of the camp, where another group of islanders was sitting patiently under a tent. They too had lost everything; their entire village had disappeared under the sea; salt water had invaded their fields and taken away their orchards. They could not contemplate going back, they said; the stench of death was everywhere, the water sources had been contaminated and would not be usable for years.

The leader of the group was a man by the name of Sylvester Solomon. A one-time serviceman in the Navy, he had retired some years ago. He too had lost all his papers: he had no idea how he would claim his pension again. Worse still the bank that had the custody of his family's money had also been swept away, along with all its records.

I told him that by law the bank was obliged to return his money and he smiled, as if at a child. I wanted to persuade him of the truth of what I'd said but when I looked into his eyes, I knew that in his place, I too would not have the energy or the courage to take on the struggles that would be required to reclaim my life's savings from that bank.

Paramjeet's story

In the same camp I encountered a Sikh woman by the name of Paramjeet Kaur. Noticing my notebook, she said: "Are you taking names too? Here, write mine down..." She was a woman of determined aspect, dressed in a dun-coloured salwaar-kameez. She had come to the islands some thirty years before, by dint of marriage. Her husband was a Sikh from Campbell Bay, a settlement on the southernmost tip of the Nicobar island chain, less than a couple of hundred kilometres from northern Sumatra. Like many others in the settlement, her husband belonged to a family that had been given a grant of land in recognition of service to the army (to distribute land in this way is a tradition that goes back to the British Indian Army and its efforts to engage the loyalties of Indian `sepoys'). But Paramjeet Kaur's in-laws came to the Nicobar islands well after Independence, in 1969, at a time when agricultural land had become scarce on the mainland. They were given 15 bighas of land and a plot to build a residence. The settlement that grew up around them was as varied as the regiments of the Indian army: there were Marathis, Malayalis, Jharkhandis and people from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

"There was nothing there but jungle then," said Paramjeet Kaur. "We cleared it with our own hands and we laid out orchards of areca and coconut. With God's blessing we prospered, and built a cement house with three rooms and a veranda."

Questions of location

The strip of land that was zoned for residential plots lay right on the sea front, providing the settlers with fine, beachfront views. It was no mere accident then that placed Paramjeet Kaur's house in the path of the tsunami of December 26: its location was determined by an ordering of space that owed more to Europe than to its immediate surroundings. The sea poses little danger to the smiling corniches of the French Riviera or the coastline of Italy: the land-encircled Mediterranean is not subject to the play of tides and it does not give birth to tropical storms. The Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, on the other hand, are fecund in the breeding of cyclones, especially the latter.

This may be the reason why a certain wariness of the sea can be seen in the lineaments of the ancient harbour cities of southern Asia. They are often situated in upriver locations, at a cautious distance from open water. In recent times the pattern seems to have been reversed so that it could almost be stated as a rule that the more modern and prosperous a settlement, the more likely it is to hug the water. On the island of Car Nicobar, for example, the Indian Air Force base was built a few dozen metres from the water's edge and it was so laid out that the more senior the servicemen, the closer they were to the sea. Although it is true that no one could have anticipated the tsunami, the choice of location is still surprising. Cyclones, frequent in this region, are also associated with surges of water that rise to heights of 10 or 15 metres and their effect would have been similar. Surely the planners were not unaware of this? But of course, it is all too easy to be wise after the event: given the choice between a view of the beach and a plot in the mosquito-infested interior what would anyone have chosen before December 26, 2004?

On the morning of that day Paramjeet Kaur and her family were inside their sea-facing house when the earthquake struck. The ground unfurled under their feet like a sheet waving in the wind and no sooner had the shaking stopped than they heard a noise `like the sound of a helicopter'. Paramjeet Kaur's husband, Pavitter Singh, looked outside and saw a wall of water speeding towards them. `The sea has split apart' (samundar phat gaya), he shouted, `run, run.' There was no time to pick up documents or jewellery; everyone who stopped to do so was killed. Paramjeet Kaur and her family ran for two kilometres, without looking back and were just able to save themselves.

"But for what?"

Thirty years of labour had been washed away in an instant; everything they had accumulated was gone, their land was sown with salt. "When we were young we had the energy to cut the jungle and reclaim the land. We laid out fields and orchards and we did well. But at my age, how can I start again? Where will I begin?"

"What will you do then?" I asked.

"We will go back to Punjab, where we have family. The government must give us land there; that is our demand."

In other camps I met office workers from Uttar Pradesh, fishermen from coastal Andhra Pradesh and construction labourers from Bengal. They had all built good lives for themselves in the islands - but now, having lost their homes, their relatives and even their identities they were intent on returning to the mainland, no matter what.

"If nothing else," one of them said to me, "we will live in slums beside the rail tracks. But never again by the sea."

How to quantify?

How do we quantify the help needed to rebuild these ruined lives? The question is answered easily enough if we pose it not in the abstract, but in relation to ourselves. To put ourselves in the place of these victims is to know that all the help in the world would not be enough. Sufficiency is not a concept that is applicable here: potentially there is no limit to the amount of relief that can be used. This is the assumption that motivates ordinary people to open their purses, even though they know that governments and big companies have already contributed a great deal: this is why no disaster assistance group has ever been known to say `we have to raise exactly this much and no more.' But when it comes to the disbursement of these funds the assumptions seem to undergo a drastic change, and nowhere more than in out-of-the-way places.

In the Andaman and Nicobar islands, although the manpower and machinery for the relief effort are supplied largely by the armed forces, overall authority is concentrated in the hands of a small clutch of senior civil servants in Port Blair. No matter the sense of crisis elsewhere: the attitude of the officialdom of Port Blair is one of disdainful self-sufficiency. On more than one occasion I heard them dismissing offers of help as unnecessary and misdirected. Supplies were available aplenty, they said; in fact they had more on their hands than could be distributed and there was a danger that perishable materials would rot on the airstrips.

This argument is of course, entirely circular: logically speaking, bottlenecks of distribution imply a need for more help, not less. But for the mandarins of Port Blair, the relief effort is a zero sum game in which they are the referees. What conceivable help could their subjects need other than the amount which they, the providers, the mai-baap, decide is appropriate to their various stations? - © Amitav Ghosh

Mini-tsunami following after-shock

Received from WILHELM KLEIN
wilhelmklein@web.de

11 Jan 2005

Late on Tuesday night (11 Jan 2005), sea-water flooded low-lying parts of Port Blair and other areas on the Andaman and Nicobar islands, which were directly in the path of last month's tsunami triggered by a powerful earthquake off Indonesia's coast.

People scurried to higher ground inland and many slept in the open after their homes were flooded, residents said. By morning, the waters were receding. "I spent the night on my balcony watching the waters rise," said M. N. Mahajan, a college principal who lives in a two-story house by the main jetty in the city. "It was horrible."

He said the sea swept past a barrier of sand bags and boulders he had built after the Dec. 26 tsunami which devastated the islands and other Indian Ocean coasts.

Considering the silver lining of future tourism

by SUBIR BHAUMIK
Published by BBC NEWS

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

11 Jan 2005

Within three days of the tsunami hitting India's eastern archipelago of Andaman and Nicobar, thousands of tourists cut short their holidays and returned to the Indian mainland.

"We were expecting a major boost in tourist arrivals this year. Our bookings were picking up sharply but the tsunami upset it all," says Manish Seth, general manager of the Bay Island Resort.

The exodus was mitigated by the more than 100 journalists from India and abroad who rushed to the Andamans to cover the aftermath of the tsunami. But only slightly.

The Andaman tourism department says at least 3,000 tourists - 90% Indian and the rest foreigners - had to be airlifted to the Indian mainland in panic.

"They cut short their visit and it was a big loss to the industry here," says former parliamentarian Bishnupada Ray.

Tourism in the Andaman and Nicobar islands has picked up in the last 20 years. There were only 10,000 tourists visiting the islands in 1980. In 2003, the number had increased almost tenfold, to 93,000. In 2004, it had been expected to cross the 100,000 mark - and then the tsunami.

"We had a lot of New Year's Eve bookings but they were all cancelled," said Manuel Selvan of Hotel Aparupa, where again the rush of journalists partly made up for the loss of occupancy.

A local group, Barefoot, had even started charters from Thailand to bring in tourists from there in big numbers.

Samit Sawhny, who runs Barefoot, says after the "curtain-raiser" in March, when three charters were flown, regular charters were to start in January.

"But it all looks a bit uncertain this season," says Sawhny. "Hopefully, all will be well next year."

If the Barefoot experiment works, more tourist companies may add the Andamans as an additional destination to South-East Asian packages.

"We don't need large volumes. To begin with, a few hundred high-spending tourists will make a difference to the local economy," says Sawhny.

If a domestic tourist spends at least 500 rupees ($11) every day and the foreigner twice as much, on average, the cost of the tsunami can be calculated as at least 20 to 30 million Indian rupees. This is small by the standards of other mainland states, but big for thefledgling local tourism industry.

Virgin beaches

But while thousands of tourists fled the islands, rattled by the fierce earthquake and the tsunami, and many more cancelled their bookings, nearly 30 young Western backpackers stayed behind at the resorts in the Havelock islands to "enjoy like hell".

"The tsunami did not affect Havelock, so we had a great time. The Havelock beach is a heaven on earth," said Peter Roebuck, an American student.

"I lay on the beach with my boyfriend the whole afternoon for four days, I have never had so much fun," said Sarah Mathieson, also from the US. These backpackers chased away consulate officials from their countries who came looking for them.

"They told us to get out and leave them in peace," says Sourabh Sen of the US Consulate in Calcutta.

The Andaman and Nicobar islands are renowned for serene, virgin beaches and fabulous underwater marine life. Neil Island and Havelock Island are a paradise for scuba diving, with scores of water sports centres. Havelock beach has been rated as one of the best in the world by Time magazine. With nearly 90% of the island forested, the environment is ideal for those seeking a week or two away from the stress and bustle of their daily lives. But many islands are out of bounds for tourists because they are inhabited by some of the world's most ancient aboriginals.

"Our tourist destinations are intact, none of 10 islands open to the tourists were affected by the tsunami and the earthquake," says Andaman tourism director Kuldeep Singh Gangar.

"The islands just have to rebuild the infrastructure, like the jetties have to be repaired for inter-island sailing. Then tourism may pick up again," says Gangar.

Rana Mathew, the government public relations officer who handled the "media tsunami" with tact and calm, says the tsunami may turn out to be a "silver lining in a dark cloud".

"Never before have so many media people come here at one time - from the West, from South-East Asia, even from China, and obviously from all parts of India," says Mathew.

"There were nearly 150 of them. Our beautiful islands have got massive international exposure and I think tourism may actually begin to pick up after the post-tsunami panic is over."

Former parliamentarian Bishnupada Ray says the government should invest heavily to rebuild the infrastructure.

"Entrepreneurs should be encouraged with loans to provide tourist services. The airfare from Chennai and Calcutta should be subsidised and you will see tourism picking up like hell," says Mr Ray. He said some cheap airlines should start operating here. Adds current parliamentarian Manoranjan Bhakta: "Tourism is the industry of the future here."

But for that to happen, his government will have to put in the initial spadework to build up the islands' infrastructure. The authorities in the islands have announced a reconstruction strategy in which revival of the tourist environment has been given highest priority.

"The administration plans to refocus on the tourism sector, which will drive the economy of the island and will provide employment to the islanders," said Lieutenant Governor Ram Kapse

Port Blair administration plans reconstruction strategy

A&N Administration Press Release

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

11 Jan 2005

The Andaman and Nicobar Administration has started taking stock of the assessment of loss incurred to private and public properties as a result of the tsunami disaster. Teams have been formed and a final assessment is expected to be ready within a week. The Administration also plans to provide shelters to all the affected people staying in relief camps at the moment before the monsoons. Steps have already been initiated in this regard.

Four broad areas of thrust have been identified during the reconstruction process. Revival of the tourism environment in the Islands is a priority for the Administration. After the earthquake and tsunami disaster, around 4000 tourists who were in the Islands, left. But all the domestic and international tourists were safe here. The Administration plans to refocus on the tourism sector which will drive the economy of the Islands and provide employment to the Islanders. Another area of reconstruction would be protection of the aboriginals. Teams have fanned out to the remote corners of the Islands to survey the effect of the disaster on the indigenous tribes of the Islands. The Administration officials have had discussion with the tribal leaders and most of them want to get back to their normal life at the earliest. The Administration plans to facilitate such a move at the earliest. Environment protection has been identified as another area of importance. The mangroves of the islands and its surrounding areas are safe.

With 86% reserved forest cover, the Administration will be studying the impact of the tsunami and earthquake on the fragile ecosystem of the Islands and take appropriate steps to maintain the ecological balance in the Islands. Focus would also be given to fishing, so that it can be converted into a major industry in the Islands. With one third of the coastal area of the country being present in the Islands, fishing would be an appropriate industry to be focused for revival to generate employment. High Value agriculture is another priority area for the Administration. With fruits like mango being available round the year and high quality produces like pineapple available a plenty, reviving of this sector would be taken up on an immediate basis.

Member of Parliament makes urgent suggestions to Prime Minister

Published by THE DAILY TELEGRAMS, Port Blair

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

11 Jan 2005

Passing an ordinance for regulating the influx of population on the lines of Inner line permit, ex-gratia of Rs 50,000/- per family to all the victims including the employees of Central Govt., payment of Rs 5 million as compensation to the next of kin of the dead and those who are missing and untraceable are the notable suggestion, among others, which forms part of the 28 print suggestions made by the Member of Parliament, Shri Manoranjan Bhakta in a letter addressed to the Prime Minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh, a copy of which was sent to the press.

The MP in his communication also emphasized on the need for setting up of departmental stores in all the major affected islands for providing essential commodities in controlled price, tax holiday to all victim taxpayers, ensuring regular shipping service between Port Blair and mainland to avoid shortage of essential commodities, taking opinions of the expert group for construction of sea walls to avoid recurrence of damage to life and property, constituting a relief Sub-Committee with dedicated officials and non-officials of the respective area for overlooking the progress of work and lifting the ban imposed in timber and sand extraction for the relief of the affected people. He also pleaded for more assistance by providing relief to the affected people in Little Andaman and taking steps for their rehabilitation.

The relief and rescue operations conducted by the Integrated Relief Command continues

A&N Administration Press Release

Reveived from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

11 Jan 2005

The relief and rescue operations conducted by the Integrated Relief Command continued today.

The Integrated Relief Command met today to review the progress of relief and rescue missions being conducted at various affected islands. Shri Manoranjan Bhakta MP, who has also been included in the IRC by Govt. of India, participated in the deliberations and gave his suggestions. Lt. General Aditya Singh, C-in-C designate who is scheduled to take over from Lt. General B.S. Thakur participated in the meeting. The IRC welcomed both of them. The priority of the day was discussion on temporary accommodation for the persons in relief camps and identification of the appropriate materials.

A series of action points were identified in the discussions of the IRC.

The Union Minister for Tribal Affairs, Shri P. R. Kyndiah, who arrived here today, visited the ITF ground relief camp where the tribal Nicobarese have been accommodated. The Minister also visited the Adi Basera relief camp where the Great Andamanese have been provided shelter. The Minister also visited the GB Pant Hospital to see Onge children admitted there for treatment. They have been recovering from their illness.

There is a report of evacuation of a person named Hak Saw from No. 41 of Campbell Bay today since the tsunami struck the area on 26.12.2004.

The number of dead bodies cremated/buried has increased by 176 to a total of 1492. The number of missing persons stands at 5528. There are 37264 persons in 105 relief camps spread across the affected Islands.

The number of sorties conducted by fixed wing defence aircrafts for delivering of relief material and personnel so far is 357 and that of defence helicopters is 97.

Together with rescue and relief operations, efforts are continuing for restoration of telecommunication links. In Car Nicobar police wireless is operational. Two telephone connectivity with STD were restored in Headquarter area and two telephones with STD installed at Jayanthi and Perka camps. The BSNL telephone exchange (7chl MCPC, 2MB IDR) have started working. Mobile services have been restored.

In Teressa police wireless has become functional. BSNL team has arrived with equipment for restoration of telecommunication network.

In Nancowry police wireless and BSNL network are operational.

In Camorta the telecommunication services have been restored. Police radio is functional.

In Little Andaman police wireless is operational. The BSNL telephone exchange at Hut Bay and RK Pur, VK Pur exchange are in final state of restoration.

In Great Nicobar police wireless, Campbell Bay telephone exchange of BSNL (256P) and 98 telephone lines have been restored.

In Katchal police wireless has started functioning. BSNL team sent with equipment and the telecommunication services is likely to be restored today.

In Car Nicobar 50 KMs of road out of 72 KMs have been made accessible. In Teressa about 60% katcha road track have been made from Bengali to Kalasi.

In Katchal approximately 50% of the roads have been restored. In Nancowry three km katcha road from Champin to Kapanga have been made whereas road is functional in Camorta. In Little Andaman repair work of road connecting Hut Bay to RK Pur is under progress. However a katcha jungle road from Hut Bay to RK Pur is in operation. In Great Nicobar where the roads have been damaged heavily alternative diversions are being taken up. The helipad is functional there.

Twelve hours power supply has been restored in Headquarter area in Car Nicobar. All 53 camps are having power supply for three hours from 6 PM to 9 PM by portable gensets. Power is being supplied to six camps in Teressa.

In Katchal power is being supplied to two camps with the help of portable gensets. There is 12 hour power suppy at Champin. Power supply in Camorta has been restored fully. In Little Andaman, five hours power supply from 5 PM to 10 PM in Headquarter area has been restored by restoring 15 KW genset.

Also a 18.5 KVA genset has been installed at the hospital in Little Andaman for 5 hours power supply. In the Headquarter area in Great Nicobar power supply is for 24 hours and portable gensets are being used to supply power to Govind Nagar area and all 14 camps in Great Nicobar.

Media intrusions into tribal reserves

by SAMIR ACHARYA

Published by SANE (Society for Andaman AND Nicobar Ecology)
sane@andamanisles.com

10 Jan 2005

His Excellency Professor Ram Kapse
Honourable Lieutenant Governor,
Andaman and Nicobar Islands
Raj Niwas, Port Blair

10th January 2004

Sir,

We are pained to note that a number of journalists, photographers and television crews have illegally intruded into the Tribal Reserves during the last one week in gross violation of the Andaman and Nicobar Protection of Aborginal Tribes Regulation, 1957.

We have definite information that they did not take special permits required to enter these reserves. Having entered, they committed abominable acts of filming the tribes with VIP Frenchie underwears, Nike hairbands and what have you. Some also paid money to the Jarawas.

We are pained to note that some national channels have already turned the aborginals into a commodity by promoting shows like "Janbaaz Junglees";.

Some of these mediapersons entered these areas with full cooperation from a military officer who was dealing with them. While the military has done a great job with relief in the post-tsunami situation, this officer has brought the services into disrepute by his insensitive behaviour.

In an island inhabited by the Sentinelese, the journalists were taken in a military helicopter and the aborginals were provoked to shoot arrows . That makes for great TV footage but reveals the insensitivity with which both a section of the media and the military handle the aborginals.

We demand a full enquiry to (a) identify the mediapersons who illegally trespassed into the tribal reserves to shoot and film (b) which official help facilitate them (c) how has the media then potrayed the aborginals.

We also demand that any violation of the ANPAT regulation by the media and the military should not go unpunished and the vigiliance in these reserves to prevent the intrusions should be stepped up.

Yours sincerely,

Samir Acharya

The work of the Crocodile Trust explained

Published by THE CROCODILE TRUST
Post Box No.1, Junglighat
P.O., Port Blair-744 103,
Andaman Islands, India
Director -Mr. Harry V. Andrews

Received from via MADHUSREE MUKHERJEE
lopchu@att.net

(undated but received at the Andaman Association 10 Jan 2005)

Below the asessment made by our team at A&N.
Also given are all details of funding and backgrounds of both Croc Bank and ANET are attched to this mail for those wanting to know more about the work we do here.
The following assessment has been made by the Andaman and Nicobar Environment Team (ANET)

According to our assessment relief measures are in full swing and we have made an assessment of the relief camps around Port Blair. The basic needs of all the people in the camp are being met both by the Integrated Relief Command efforts and Local bodies.

ANET is therefore concentrating on sending immediate relief to the Nicobars and as a next step will take up rehabilitation and reconstruction of their homes and livelihoods. This needs to be done on a war footing before the rains set in. It rains very heavily in the Islands and rehab and reconstruction work will become very difficult once the monsoons set in.

ANET has been working in the Islands ever since 1989 and has a strong network among the local populace and the various departments all over the Islands and will prove to be very effective in rehabilitation and relief measures.

The Approach we have taken:

1. We have formed a team with local volunteers to oversee relief work at Port Blair and coordinate relief efforts and volunteers in the Nicobars.

2. This team is working in close co-operation with the local administration and the defence forces for smooth functioning and quick action.

3. We are assessing needs on a day to day basis and distributing the relief on a need basis.

For this reason we prefer to receive help in cash rather than kind for the following reasons:

1. Everything needed is available in the market of Port Blair.

2. It is faster and easier to buy whatever is needed and supply to the relief camp rather than waiting for relief material to be sent by sea or air from the mainland which is very complicated and slow.

3. In this way we can ensure that only essential supplies are collected and distributed. We are concerned that presently large consignments of non essential supplies are being wasted or dumped all over the place and this can and should be avoided.

This assessment is for immediate relief to the Nicobars. More information on long term rehab will be given once our team which has gone to the Islands give us more feedback. They have a very good knowledge of the terrain and the location of villages in all the islands that are inhabited. As of now we have worked out a system with the forces to send relief to the Nicobars.

With regard to funding local and overseas, please find the details below:

Funds can be sent to us by draft or bank transfers to the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust, payable at Indian Overseas Bank, Mamallapuram.
FCRA Number- 075820118 dt.19/11/1985.

We also have 80G for donors who require income tax exemption.

FOR BANK TRANSFERS:

UNITED KINGDOM

H.O. SWIFT
IOB AIN BB 001
Pound Sterling:
STANDARD CHARTERED BANK, LONDON, ACCOUNT No. 01-708077801

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

H.O. SWIFT
IOB AIN BB 001
US Dollars
CITI BANK, NEW YORK
ACCOUNT No. NY 36050915

GERMANY

H.O. SWIFT
IOB AIN BB 001
DRESDNER BANK, GERMANY

NETHERLANDS

H.O. SWIFT
IOB AIN BB 001
ABN AMRO

SINGAPORE/MALAYSIA/SRILANKA

H.O. SWIFT
IOB AIN BB 001
INDIAN OVERSEAS BANK

FROM OTHERS

INDIAN OVERSEAS BANK,
MAMALLAPURAM-603 104,
TAMIL NADU, SOUTH INDIA
ACCOUNT No. CD 61
MADRAS CRCOCODILE BANK TRUST

Relief work continues

A&N administration press Release

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

10 Jan 2005

The Lt. Governor visited Campbell Bay today along with Member of Parliament, Shri Manoranjan Bhakta to oversee the relief and rehabilitation work being undertaken by different agencies. Necessary directions were given, on the spot, to the concerned officers to further improve the relief effort.

The number of dead bodies cremated/buried has increased by six to a total of 1316. The number of missing person stands at 5542. The number of sorties conducted by Defence Aircrafts for delivering of relief material and personnel adds up to 455.

The Rotary International representatives headed by Shri Sudhir Mehta met the officials of the Andaman & Nicobar Administration with the offer of assistance to meet the impact of the natural calamity. They have despatched large volume of relief materials and resolved to sponsor 150 houses. After discussion with the Administration, they have come forward to take up the supply of medical equipment required for the six Primary Health Centres of the Southern Group of Islands. They also wanted to know the manner of help which could be extended for reconstruction of houses in Car Nicobar.

Radhaswami Satsang had called on Smt Smita Kapse and the Chief Secretary and discussed the feasibility of their participation in long term rehabilitation work based on their experience in Gujarat. They came forward to help in the construction of schools with appropriate pre-fab materials. They stated that after construction of such schools in consultation with the Government agencies and the people, they would hand over the buildings to the Government Departments concerned.

The work of estimation of losses has been taken up through various Departments and teams. Verification of the Government employees working in Car Nicobar was undertaken on 8.1.2005. A meeting was held in the Secretariat with representatives of the Employees Association to discuss the verification of missing Government employees and to help in the process of constituting substitute teams of employees for relieving the exhausted employees working in the Tsunami affected areas. It was decided that teams of officials may be deputed on temporary duty of about a month and appropriate arrangements may be made by the respective Government Departments for their temporary accommodation and stay.

Before the earthquake and tsunami a total of 5206 number of Govt. employees were posted in Nicobar Islands and Little Andaman. Of these, dead bodies of twelve persons have been recovered. A total of 210 Govt. employees are confirmed to be missing. Verification is underway with regard to the remaining employees. A team headed by Shri Jacob Varghese, Statistical Officer is functioning in the Secretariat to complete the work of verification, as early as possible.

The Department of Shipping, Andaman Harbour Works and Port Management Board have been advised to keep a close watch on the level of water through monitoring gauge. Although the water level was found to be higher than the normal level, there is no impediment to navigation or other activities. Revenue and Police officials have been advised to maintain vigilance in all the vulnerable low-lying areas.

On 9th evening the Lt. Governor had a meeting with the Chief Secretary, Secretary (Forests/PCCF) and other senior officers to take up extraction of timber and non-timber forest produces in accordance with the relaxation of the earlier orders of the Supreme Court. A Committee has been constituted as advised by the Supreme Court under the chairmanship of Shri S.S. Choudhary, Chief Conservator of Forests. Lt. Governor has directed that logs should be made available to the Government Saw Mills at Betapur and Chatham, at the earliest, in order to provide building material for construction of houses,etc.

The Director General of Lighthouses & Lightships Shri Manmohan Singh Suman has been in Port Blair to review the extent of damages suffered by the Department of Lighthouses in the affected areas. It is reported that nine employees, two family members and six labourers posted at Indira Point Lighthouse have not been traced. The caretaker of the Lighthouse at Pullowmillow has died. Staff posted at Keating Point (Car Nicobar), East Island, Bambooka, Katchal and Little Andaman Lighthouses are safe. The buildings and equipment, except the Lighthouse towers at Indira Point and Keating Point, Car Nicobar have completely been damaged. Lighthouse towers and equipment at Katchal (East and West) and Interview Island are also completely damaged. Ground floor of staff quarters at Junglighat, Port Blair was flooded because of the Tsunami. The staff were evacuated and shifted to Lambamline Lighthouse Officer's colony. They have now shifted back to their accommodation.

The Department will be carrying out a detailed survey of the Lighthouses and their restoration and a dedicated Naval Vessel with Helicopter is being pressed into service for this purpose.

Let Nature's defences be!

by PANKAJ SEKHSARIA

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

9 Jan 2005

The lesson from the tsunami disaster is as clear as it can be. The Coastal Regulation Zone needs to be further strengthened, says PANKAJ SEKHSARIA, looking at the situation in the Andaman and Nicobar islands.

The coastal protection wall in Wandoor in the Andamans

THE accompanying picture was taken in 1998, and in many ways depicts the entire story I want to tell. You will notice that this picture shows many things: a rather rocky coast exposed at low tide, small patches of mangroves in the background and number of uprooted trees and tree stumps too. Fore-grounding all of this and standing out rather starkly is the ongoing construction of a coastal protection wall that borders the Mahatma Gandhi Marine National Park in Wandoor, located roughly 20 kilometres west of Port Blair.

It would be stating the obvious that this area looked different a few years earlier, but often it is the most obvious that we miss out completely. Once, there was good standing forest on the landward side of the wall; there were dense patches of mangroves where only occasional ones are seen today and the rocky coast was, in fact, a good sandy beach that was used by sea turtles for nesting.

Collective destruction

Over the years the sand got mined away to construct concrete buildings in various parts of Port Blair; the mangroves got cut, mainly for fuel; and parts of the coastal forests and coral reefs too were destroyed. Put together, it was the collective destruction of all the defence mechanisms that nature has provided against the force and power of the sea. It shows, in a microcosm, what has happened along the entire length of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for the last few decades. It is the same story from Great Nicobar, the island closest to the epicentre of the recent massive earthquake, to Diglipur at the northern end in the Andamans, which was hit during the last major earthquake in the islands that occurred in September 2002: beaches mined away and mangroves and coral reefs destroyed in the name of development and progress.

If natural walls have been destroyed, the sea is bound to start moving in. And when the sea starts to move, all that can be done is to put up concrete walls that will try to stop the sea. This is exactly what the picture shows us and the biggest irony is that this wall is being built using sand mined from another beach further down the coast.

It's a vicious cycle like none other!

And that's not all. Many of the constructions in these islands built using this sand have been badly affected by the earthquake shocks. Many are reported to have even collapsed. By comparison, timber buildings in Port Blair, some of them a 100 years old, have escaped virtually unscathed. This is a lesson we've all been taught even in schools. If, however, one would have seen the proliferation of multi-storied concrete constructions in these seismically active islands in the last few years, it would seem planners in Port Blair never got these lessons. It's come the hard way now, but hopefully it's been learnt.

CRZ violations

These will be critical as the islands will soon be moving into the reconstruction and rehabilitation mode. This might be the golden opportunity for the sand mining, construction and builder lobby to make a fast killing. This is what will have to be guarded against strongly. Equally important is to keep in mind the value of the provisions of the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification. Innumerable buildings in these islands, including many government ones, have been constructed in violation of the CRZ. In the last couple of years, there were regular complaints from the construction, hotel and tourism lobby that the CRZ was obstructing the development of infrastructure and the tourism industry here. They wanted it relaxed so that buildings could come up even closer to the coastline. The lesson from the present disaster, then, is as clear as it can be: the CRZ needs to be further strengthened, not relaxed.

The need to stop destruction

Dr. Sarang Kulkarni, one of India's leading coral reef scientists has worked in the marine national park in Wandoor for over six years. He was, in fact, witness to the drama and the destruction that occurred here when the tsunami struck. "An important function of fringing (coral) reefs along the wave-swept shores," he explains, "is preventing coastal erosion and storm damage. This is particularly important for the regions with low-lying coastal plains, where fringing and barrier reefs protect coast from the ravages of tropical storms and tidal waves." The same, he says, is true for mangroves and beaches too.

One interesting fall out of the disaster of December 26, was an announcement made five days later by the Chennai Port Trust (CnPT). In an effort to protect the port in the future, the CnPT announced plans to construct a 10 km long artificial beach from left of the Cooum river to the fishing harbour in North Chennai. The feasibility of this is not yet known, and neither can this option be even considered for every other place. What should be immediately stopped is the destruction of the various natural features along the coast that already play the role of protector.

While, clearly, the beaches, mangroves and coral reefs would not have "stopped" the powerful and huge waves that hit the coast, they would have significantly reduced the impact of the waves and the destruction that resulted. Hundreds, if not thousands of lives could have been saved. Thousands of families would have been saved their tears, their sorrow and the grief they are experiencing this very moment.

It's certainly not asking for too much. It's the least that can be done.

The Andamanese Negrito, an ancient link to Africa lives on in Bay of Bengal

by NICHOLAS WADE

Pulbished by THE NEW YORK TIMES

Received from TOM VATER
tomvater@yahoo.com

9 Jan 2005

Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago east of India, are direct descendants of the first modern humans to have inhabited Asia, geneticists conclude in a new study.

But the islanders lack a distinctive genetic feature found among Australian aborigines, another early group to leave Africa, suggesting they were part of a separate exodus.

The Andaman Islanders are "arguably the most enigmatic people on our planet," a team of geneticists led by Dr. Erika Hagelberg of the University of Oslo write in the journal Current Biology.

Their physical features - short stature, dark skin, peppercorn hair and large buttocks - are characteristic of African Pygmies. "They look like they belong in Africa, but here they are sitting in this island chain in the middle of the Indian Ocean," said Dr. Peter Underhill of Stanford University, a co-author of the new report.

Adding to the puzzle is that their language, according to Joseph Greenberg, who, before his death in 2001, classified the world's languages, belongs to a family that includes those of Tasmania, Papua New Guinea and Melanesia.

Dr. Hagelberg has undertaken the first genetic analysis of the Andamanese with the help of two Indian colleagues who took blood samples - the islands belong to India - and by analyzing hair gathered almost a century ago by a British anthropologist, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. The islands were isolated from the outside world until the British set up a penal colony there after the Indian mutiny of 1857.

Only four of the dozen tribes that once inhabited the island survive, with a total population of about 500 people. These include the Jarawa, who still live in the forest, and the Onge, who have been settled by the Indian government.

Genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element passed down only through women, shows that the Onge and Jarawa people belong to a lineage, known as M, that is common throughout Asia, the geneticists say. This establishes them as Asians, not Africans, among whom a different mitochondrial lineage, called L, is dominant.

The geneticists then looked at the Y chromosome, which is passed down only through men and often gives a more detailed picture of genetic history than the mitochondrial DNA. The Onge and Jarawa men turned out to carry a special change or mutation in the DNA of their Y chromosome that is thought to be indicative of the Paleolithic population of Asia, the hunters and gatherers who preceded the first human settlements.

The mutation, known as Marker 174, occurs among ethnic groups at the periphery of Asia who avoided being swamped by the populations that spread after the agricultural revolution that occurred about 8,000 years ago. It is found in many Japanese, in the Tibetans of the Himalayas and among isolated people of Southeast Asia, like the Hmong.

The discovery of Marker 174 among the Andamanese suggests that they too are part of this relict Paleolithic population, descended from the first modern humans to leave Africa.

Dr. Underhill, an expert on the genetic history of the Y chromosome, said the Paleolithic population of Asia might well have looked as African as the Onge and Jarawa do now, and that people with the appearance of present-day Asians might have emerged only later. It is also possible, he said, that their resemblance to African Pygmies is a human adaptation to living in forests that the two populations developed independently.

A finding of particular interest is that the Andamanese do not carry another Y chromosome signature, known as Marker RPS4Y, that is common among Australian aborigines.

This suggests that there were at least two separate emigrations of modern humans from Africa, Dr. Underhill said. Both probably left northeast Africa by boat 40,000 or 50,000 years ago and pushed slowly along the coastlines of the Arabian Peninsula and India. No archaeological record of these epic journeys has been found, perhaps because the world's oceans were 120 meters lower during the last ice age and the evidence of early human passage is under water.

One group of emigrants that acquired the Marker 174 mutation reached Southeast Asia, including the Andaman islands, and then moved inland and north to Japan, in Dr. Underhill's reconstruction. A second group, carrying the Marker RPS4Y, took a different fork in Southeast Asia, continuing south toward Australia.

Bakhtawar Singh dead

A&N Administration Press Release

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

9 Jan 2005

Mr. Bakhtawar Singh (89) retired Deputy Supterintendent of Police of the Andaman and Nicobar Police has passed away last night at G. B. Pant Hospital, Port Blair.

One of the most distinguished officer of the Islands, Shri Bakhtawar Singh joined Police Department in the year 1935. He gained international fame by succeeding in his endeavours of establishing contact with the hostile Jarawa Tribe years back. He was their friend for long and contributed immensely to their welfare. He also played a pioneering role in setting up of AAJVS as its Executive Secretary. Lauding its efforts in bringing Jarawas and non-tribals closer, the Govt. granted him extension of service.

He won several honours and medals during his illustrious career. A genial man known for his strict and honest ways of life, he held several important positions in Police with distinction. He was also President, Police Gurudwara Committee for a few years.

He is survived by wife and 5 children ( 3 sons and 2 daughters). Several Police and other officers led by IGP Shri S. B. Deol paid their tributes to the departed officer. The mortal remains of Shri Bhakhtawar Singh were consigned to flames at Junglighat Shamshan Ghat this afternoon.

How the Great Andamanese save themselves from extinction

from NEELESH MISRA
Published by THE STATESMAN

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

9 Jan 2005

The last few dozen remaining members of an ancient indigenous tribe in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands said they raced up a mountain to escape the devastating tsunami - and avoid extinction.

"No one was hurt. Everyone is all right," Jiroki, the king of the Great Andamanese tribe, said on Friday from a hospital in Port Blair.

"The water was rushing up very fast. It seemed to be following us," said his wife, Surmayee. "We stayed in the forest for 5 days. There was some rice. We ate that. Then there was nothing, so we went hungry." The Great Andamanese were once the largest tribe in the region with an estimated population of 10,000 in 1789. The government says only 43 Great Andamanese remain, while Jiroki says there are 50, of whom 10 are his children. Anthropologists believe the five ancient tribes, including the Jarawas, Shompens, Onges and Sentinelese, date back 70,000 years.

Rescuers last week brought the remaining Great Andamanese to Port Blair in the wake of the tsunami. Jiroki, whose tribe lives in a forest on Strait Island in the south of the archipelago, seized the opportunity to seek treatment for epilepsy at a state-run hospital.

Speaking in broken Hindi, Jiroki and Surmayee said that when the earthquake jolted their homes on Strait Island, they ordered the tribe to flee. "I am the king. They follow what I say," said Jiroki, wearing a red T-shirt and shorts. "We asked the wireless operator to send a message to Port Blair. But the machine and battery had been damaged by flood waters." The island's jetty was smashed so no boats could land. The tribe members' clothes, utensils and other household articles were all washed away, Surmayee said.

And contrary to speculation by some anthropologists, she said the Great Andamanese did not sense the impending arrival of the tsunamis. Some experts say the Great Andamanese are a sad example of how indigenous people quickly lose centuries of tradition and culture when they come in contact with the outside world. "I have written them off. They hardly have a culture or tradition of their own," said Samir Acharya, head of the independent Andaman and Nicobar Society. "They have all forgotten their own dialect. They are mostly acting as copycats of the rest of us." The tribe maintains links with government officials, and a police officer, a wireless operator and a doctor 's assistant live with them on Strait Island. Some members of the tribe work in police and government jobs in Port Blair.

The tribal leaders admitted their lifestyles are different from those of their ancestors. "We don't use bows and arrows now. We hunt fish and pigs with spears," Surmayee said. The Great Andamanese traditionally eat roots, seafood, turtles and turtle eggs, but in recent years have begun eating rice, pulses and bread. "They are exposed to highly communicable diseases besides unhealthy drinking habits which, of course, are acquired after contact with the moribund dominant and advanced communities," according to the Andaman and Nicobar government website.

Surmayee was ready to leave the city and return home on Friday. "I want to go back. I don't like it here. I am used to being in the forest," she said. But her husband disagreed. "We feel nice interacting with the outside world. Earlier our heart was only in hunting," Jiroki said. "There were no movies, nothing".

Good news on the Onge front Amid the death and devastation, there was some good news for the fast dwindling Onge tribe. A baby was born to a couple in the worst-hit Hut Bay.

The couple was picked up after rescuers spotted them with a three-day-old baby. As per the 2001 Census, the Onge population stood at 96. Two more babies were born to tsunami-hit couples during evacuation from Nicobar to Port Blair recently. - Neeraj Vagholikar

Moken fund to help the sea gypsies

by TOM VATER
tomvater@yahoo.com

9 Jan 2005

Many thanks to all people who contributed to the Moken fund to help the sea gypsies of Thailand help themselves and remain dignified human beings with their own distinct culture and character in the wake of the tsumani that devasted their villages and destroyed their boats. Should you have any more money in your pockets, here is some info to the link of the UNESCO Andaman Pilot Project.

http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk/further/archives/2005/01/the_plight_of_t.html

http://www.thehorsehospital.com/

http://www.nthposition.com

Most Moken have returned to their island, Ko Surin. After lingering in the camp for a few more days following our visit last week, the wife of the Thai Deputy Prime Minister Chaturon dropped in on the sea gypsies.

Dunung told the lady that the Moken were going out of their minds and needed to go back to Surin.

Well, the Moken found the right person to talk to - they were put on several boats and sent back to Surin.

What's more, the supreme head of Buddhism in Thailand (the Sangkarat), has stated that the Moken should be left alone and must be free to choose to go where they want.

Endorsements don't come from higher sources in this part of the world and this did much to silence greedy NGOs and politicians concerned with nationalist agendas.

130 of the community of 200 are now back on Surin, some others have traveled down to Takua Pa, a near-by provincial town and a few have chosen to go to Ko Rah, an island just in front of Kuraburi. These stragglers are too scared to go out to Surin right now, which is a long way from the mainland, but once they get some positive feedback from their relatives, they are likely to follow. The great news is that the refugee camp in the local temple at Kuraburi has been desolved.

The Moken are now in the process of clearing a new beach, but have not yet got any houses or boats. The Thai government and private donors like you have provided them with clothes and food for a few days. The National Park has allowed them to fell trees in the jungle for building materials.

It's great, it's a new start for this community.

Aroon is visiting them Thursday, to hand out a first batch of money - mainly for tools so that construction of a new village can begin. We have figured out that a long tail boat with engine costs 60.000 Baht, around 1500$US. Engines are easy to get but boats are hard to come by in the wake of the tsunami as most boat building businesses in the region were washed away. A local contact of the Moken is scouring the coast for new boats, but it likely to take time before the sea gypsies of the Andaman Sea become mobile again in any real sense.

Many many thanks for your donations and, if you can, please give generously - the Moken symbolise and embody a spirit of freedom and independence unheard of in 'the real world'. Many thanks to all those who let us use their websites to launch the appeal.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits Port Blair

Published by THE HINDU

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

8 Jan 2005

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today announced an immediate grant of Rs 200 crore for Andaman and Nicobar Islands, badly hit by the tsunami disaster, and declared launching of a comprehensive plan for relief measures and rebuilding of infrastrcture.

Making a slew of promises after touring the affected areas of the islands, the Prime Minister said the government would provide additional funds for various employment programmes, adequate grants for tribals, medical health programmes and infrastructure building.

He said he would appeal to education boards to defer examinations for Class X and XII by a few months for those who opted for it.

State-owned Pawan Hans Helicopters will be asked to provide additional services to the islands, Singh said adding, mobile telephone connectivity will be given to all the major islands.

Singh said in view of the seismic and tidal activities around Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a team of scientific experts will be constituted to study submergence of areas and tidal and seismic patterns to help locate places for new settlements.

At the national level, the Prime Minister said, an early warning system will be developed so that during such disasters adequate time was available to prepare.

Singh, who reviewed the situation with Lt. Governor Ram Kapse and top officers of the armed forces, asserted that the Centre and the Union Territory administration were fully equipped to meet the challenges and that all steps will be taken to prevent outbreak of epidemics.

Asked about measures being taken for orphaned children and widows, Singh said the Centre will work with the UT government and interested NGOs to devise effective programmes for their settlement.

He said the immediate objective was to provide "effective relief" at the camps and ensure availability of adequate food, medicines and temporary shelters besides educational facilities.

Stating that he would interact with the Department of Science and Technology, the Prime Minister said the aim would be to study the phenomena of tidal waves and provide effective protection in case of such calamities.

On a day's visit, Singh went to relief camps in Campell Bay and Nicobar promising a healing touch to victims who have lost their near and dear ones and found their sources of livelihood wipped out.

"We will help to the maximum extent possible. We want to ensure that each affected family gets assistance from the Centre in terms of employment, education, housing and other basic necessities," he said.

According to official estimates, 1205 people have lost their lives in the Andaman and Nicobar region in 192 affected villages. A population of over 42,000 have been hit and 5,740 are reported missing. As many as 30 relief camps have been set up housing 11,239 victims.

Tsunami calamity relief assistance announced by Prime Minister

Anbdaman and Nicobar Administration Press Release

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

8 Jan 2005

A. Immediate Relief

An amount of Rs.200 crores will be released to the Andaman and Nicobar Government for implementing rehabilitation measures.

This will be used for

I. Provision of food for all affected families- this will cost about Rs. 60 crores.

II. Immediate supply of construction material for temporary houses for those who have lost houses. About 10,000 houses costing Rs. 25 crores.

III. Additional funds of Rs. 10 crores for wage employment programmes.

IV. Additional grants of Rs. 10 crores to tribal councils for restoring community halls, social infrastructure.

V. Telemedicine programme to be launched by Space Department.

VI. In addition, the following will be done to provide relief:

i. School exams for classes X and XII will be held a few months later for those children who opt for it.
ii. Pawan Hans will be asked to provide additional helicopter services.
iii. Mobile telephone connectivity will be provided in major islands.

Keeping in mind the extensive seismic and tidal activity that is going on, the Government will immediately constitute a team of scientific experts to study the sub-mergence, tidal patterns and seismic patterns to help locate places for resettlement.

B. Long Term Rehabilitation

For the long term, the Central Government will focus on a comprehensive rehabilitation plan for the islands to be implemented in a project mode.

Funds will be sought from all possible sources for this purpose.

This plan will cover

i. Permanent Housing which is disaster proof and calamity proof.

ii. Reconstruction of harbours and jetties.

iii. Establishment of disaster warning systems and shelters.

iv. Sustainable development of the region for a better quality of life while conserving the ecology.

Car Nicobar island said to return to normalcy

Published by THE DAILY TELEGRAMS, Port Blair

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

8 Jan 2005

Contrary to general perception outside, the life in Car Nicobar is fast returning to normalcy. There is hope and not despair on the faces of tenacious Nicobari tribes who had been face to face with the fury of nature when the killer tsunami waves hit the islands only recently.

A large team of media-persons which met a number of tribals at Kakana settlement this afternoon were pleasantly surprised to see them beaming and determined to stay on their soil, come what may.

Mr Obed, the first Captain of the village and grandson of Padmashree Edward Kutchet, the then chief captain of Car Nicobar, gave an eyewitness account of the devastation caused by tsunami on the morn of 26th December last. According to him, waves as high as coconut trees swept his village away. Of about 400 hundred villagers, 85 are still missing, he informed. Mr Obed as well as a number of others were all praise for the timely relief efforts made by the administration and defence forces. He told the visiting scribes 'We love our land and do not wish to leave it under any circumstances'.

At Bishop John Richardson Hospital, the media team saw a number of women and children admitted for treatment of injuries sustained during the tsunami disaster. Adequate stock of medicines and services of doctors, most of whom are specialists, are available in the hospital to cater to the needs of the patients.

The media-persons also visited the devastated airforce residential colony which used to be a place bubbling with life not too distant in the past. The rubbles in the area presented a grim reminder of the scale of the catastrophe.

Earlier, the Officer in-charge of relief operations in Car Nicobar, Brig.J M Devdoss, briefed the media-persons about the operation Madad so rigorously undertaken by the Integrated Relief Command. He said apart from continuous relief supplies, the IRC is taking care of resettlement of camps, establishment of communication network, clearing of roads etc. according to him, helipads have been created at sawai and Arong villages to facilitate easy distribution of food and other necessary relief materials.

First contact with Jarawa since disaster

Published by THE STATESMAN

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

7 Jan 2005

Armed with bows and arrows, seven men from the ancient Jarwa tribe came out of the forest for the first time since the Andaman and Nicobar islands were battered by the tsunami.

In a rare meeting with outsiders, the men said today that all 250 members of the tribe had escaped inland and were surviving on coconuts. He, however, did not elaborate on how they managed to escape.

"We are all safe after the earthquake. We are in the forest in Balughat," Ashu, one of the men, said. Even though the Jarwas sometimes meet local officials to receive government-funded supplies, the tribe is wary of visitors.

"My world is in the forest," Ashu said through an interpreter in a restricted forest area at the northern end of South Andaman Island. "Your world is outside. We don't like people from outside."

Anthropologists estimate that the island's more primitive tribes - Jarwas, Great Andamanese, Onges, Sentinelese and Shompens have dwindled to between 400 and 1,000.

Government officials and anthropologists have speculated that ancient knowledge of the movement of wind, sea and birds may have saved the indigenous tribes from the tsunami. But Ashu and his companions refused to talk about how they avoided the waves.

The seven Jarwa men - wearing only underwear and amulets - emerged from the forest to meet government officials, accompanied by two reporters and a photographer.

Ashu, who said he was in his early 20s, gave his name and those of three others of his tribe - Danna, Lah and Tawai. The men stopped the photographer from taking pictures.

"We fall sick if we are photographed," Ashu said.

The Indian Red Cross has started work

Published by THE DAILY TELEGRAMS, Port Blair

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

7 Jan 2005

The Indian Red Cross Society (Andaman Branch) Port Blair has started with relief works from the very next day after the earthquake and tsunami hit these Islands on Dec 26, 2004. The IRCS had distributed 10 Poly Sheets, 1000 Bed Sheets, .1000 Towels, 90 Kitchen Sets, 1000 Cases of Mineral Water, Amul Milk 375 Cartoon (Tetra Pack), 19 Degchies and 1 Patila, 200 Torches, 400 Batteries and Candles, Match Box, Mortein Coil 200 Pkts each besides shawls to the kids below 1 year in relief camps at Haddo (Telugu) Medium till 6th January, 2005.

Dr. Ganthimati from Indian Red Cross Society, National Head Quarters, New Delhi and Mr. Azmat Ulla from International Federation of Red Cross Society visited these islands on 4th January 2005. They met the relief commissioners, the Director of Health Services, and the Chief Engineer APWD and assured to send all the relief materials needed for the rehabilitation of 10000 thousand population.

The family packs containing kitchen utensil sets, sarees/ lungis, T-shirts, dhotis, /blankets, bed sheets, towels, shelter materials, water purification tabs 600000 tablets, bleaching powder 5000 kgs and supply temporary plastic latrine squatting plates 500 Pcs. The IRCS will also supply 4 Nos. Water Purification Units which can provide purified safe drinking water of 35000 liters per day; to operate they need raw water and electricity (or diesel to generate electricity), They have also arranged tetra pack milk 35000 liters from Amul Company, a communication received here said.

Sources of general information

from LYLA BAVADAM

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

7 Jan 2005

The tsunami has taken so many lives and touched so many more that nearly every media outlet in the world will be covering some aspect of this story for a long time. Here are some excellent resources for journalists, from finding sources to backgrounding charities.

AlertNet.org

This comprehensive site (AlertNet.org) gives you a good overview of the latest aid efforts. Created by the Reuters Foundation, the site gathers information from a network of more than 300 humanitarian organizations. Here is a direct link to descriptions of what each aid group is currently doing in Asia related to the tsunami. (See 2003 Web Tips column on this site).

SAJA

The South Asian Journalists Association has compiled an excellent, continuously updated listing of experts and journalists in South Asia, news and opinion links, and ways you can help. It's at:http://www.saja.org/tsunami.html. Another fantastic resource SAJA offers is its Freelance Forum, which lists more than 367 available journalists in 35 cities in South Asia. If your organization is in need of a freelancer in South Asia to help cover the tsunami aftermath, look here first.

Tsunamihelp.blogspot.com

Professional journalists aren't the only ones gathering great resources about the tsunami. A group of more than dozen bloggers in Asia have created a weblog offering one of the best compilations of resources, aid, donations, and volunteer efforts, updated more frequently than most news organizationsupdate their websites. This is a great site to use for staying on top of the latest developments, find useful links and discover story ideas: http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/

Here's another blog with a great set of resources:
http://wetware.blogspot.com/2004/12/tsunami-relief-efforts.html

Press releases and Experts:
PRNewswire has created a special page (registration required) where journalists can easily monitor all the latest press releases related to the disaster.

PRNewswire has also put together a useful list of experts worth interviewing for related stories here. (Regular readers of this column will recognize the first name on the list! You must be signed in to PRNewswire to see this.)

GuideStar

Hundreds of organizations are collecting money for tsunami aid, but how do you know if they're trustworthy, or how much of the money they're collecting they'll spend on aid versus administration? I highly recommend researching nonprofit companies before listing them in your publication. Readers may assume any charities listed are trustworthy, so it's up to us to check them out first. The site offers this quick link to information about more than 100 of the agencies collecting aid.

Missing persons sites

Another group of bloggers has created a good site, http://tsunamimissing.blogspot.com, aimed at helping people find missing friends or family. The site has even set up a page on a photo sharing site, flikr, where people can post photos of missing people. A number of other sites are making similar efforts:

http://tsunamiforum.org/

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/12/28/email.appeals/

http://newsbbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/4129995.stm

http://www.icrcorg/home.nsf/home/webfamilylinks

http://thorntree.lonelyplanet.com/categories.cfm?catid=68

http://asian-quake-tsunamis.onthe-internet.com/

Satellite photos

DigitalGlobe is making a number of high-resolution satellite images available to media for free. The images show the areas hit by the tsunami before, during, and after. Amazing stuff.
http://www.digitalglobe.com/tsunami_gallery.html

Andaman tribes have lessons to teach

by RANJIT DEVRAI

Received from WILHELM KLEIN
wilhelmklein@web.de

7 Jan 2005

Stone-age tribes living on India's remote Andaman and Nicobar islands not only survived the devastating Dec. 26 tsunami -- triggered by an undersea quake whose epicenter was closest to their homelands -- but may actually have a few lessons in reading natural early warning systems for their less perceptive Asian neighbours, say scientists.

While close to 150,000 people have been confirmed dead on the coasts of a dozen countries around the Bay of Bengal after being caught unaware by giant killer waves, the Onges, Jarawas, Sentinelese, and Great Andamanese, who live in the archipelago escaped unscathed because they took to the forests and higher ground well in time.

''These tribes live close to nature and are known to heed biological warning signs like changes in the cries of birds and the behaviour patterns of land and marine animals,'' V. Raghavendra Rao, Director of the Kolkata-based Anthropological Survey of India (ASI) told IPS in a phone interrview.

Based on reports from his field staff on the badly devastated archipelago of 550 islands, strung out between Burma's main port of Rangoon and Indonesia's Sumatra island, Rao confirmed to IPS that there were no known casualties among the five tribes -- although there are unconfirmed reports of a few missing Onges.

The Andaman and Nicobar islands have a population of around 500,000 people of which the tribals form less than 30,000. Of the tribals, the biggest group is the Nicobarese at around 20,000. Rao and other ASI experts believe that the tribes may hold the key to building a resource base for a reliable and cost-effective coastal warning system against future catastrophes.

Experts around the world have blamed the unusually high human toll from the tsunami, which was spawned by a huge undersea quake in the northern tip of Sumatra island, on the absence of a reliable early warning system such as the sophisticated Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre based in Honolulu, Hawaii.

But top Indian scientists think that such a system may not be practical for the countries of the Indian Ocean where tsunamis are extremely rare.

''Building up a tsunami prediction network for the Indian Ocean will be a gigantic effort - after all we cannot build shelters against 25-foot (7.62 meters) high waves to cover hundreds of kilometers of coastline,'' said S.Z.

Qasim, India's best-known oceanographer and vice-chairman of the Society for Indian Ocean Studies. ''As soon as things settle down we are planning to document the vast and

valuable indigenous, intangible knowledge and survival skills that exist on the islands -- not only on impending catastrophes but also on herbs and medicinal plants,'' Rao, one of the few Indian officials authorised to speak on the subject said.

''Immediate documentation is important because we also need to record how the tribes that live by hunting and foraging adapt to the major geomorphological changes wrought to their habitat on the islands by the Dec. 26 events,'' he added.

These tribes have origins reaching into Mesolithic and Upper Paleolithic era (between 20,000 and 60,000 years old) and efforts at scientifically studying their unique genetic characteristic have been made in collaboration with the Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB).

DNA studies carried out by the CCMB have shown the Onges who inhabit reservations on Dugong Creek and the South Bay of Little Andaman Island to be the most primitive of the tribes and closely related to African pygmies. That also makes them the most endangered, with fewer than a 100 individuals now known to exist, partly as a result of catching diseases like hepatitis from contact with outsiders that began under British colonial rule in 1886.

Another Negrito group, the Jarawas on Great Andaman island suffered not only as result of diseases introduced by outsiders but also because of punitive xpeditions carried out by the British and the Japanese who occupied the islands and built bunkers and fortifications on them during World War II.

Since the construction of the Andaman Truck road connecting the administrative centre of Port Blair with Diglipur, on Great Andaman, the Jarawas have been increasingly coming into contact with Indian settlers who originally came to build the road but then stayed on as encroachers.

The Sentinelese, who are believed to be originally an offshoot of the Onges live on North Sentinel island west of South Andaman and are probably the last of the world's Paleolithic people that have no contact with the rest of the world because the island is completely out of bounds to outsiders.

Scientists believe that because of the extreme isolation of the Sentinelese, this tribe has become biomedically valuable. They warn that these tribespeople, in the future, could be targeted by bio-prospectors for valuable genetic traits that may have long ago vanished in other ethnic or racial groups.

Confirmation of their safety came from the Indian coast guard which carried out surveys over the 60 square kilometer Sentinel island last week on low-flying helicopters which were greeted with arrows and spears by the hostile Sentinelese.

The director general of the coast guard, Vice-Admiral A.K. Singh, said on Monday that he was relieved to see the hostility because it was sure sign that the Sentinelese were fighting fit and not interested in receiving outside help following the tsunami. He had pictures of Sentinelese aiming arrows at his chopper to prove the point.

Apart from the four Negrito groups, the southern part of the archipelago (Nicobar group) is home to tribes of Mongoloid origin like the reclusive Shompens numbering 300 and the more sophisticated, Nicobarese who may have migrated from Indonesia's Sumatra island nearby.

Most of the tribal victims of the tsunami were Nicobarese and as many as a quarter of their population of 20,000 people, who are mostly coastal farmers and followers of the Christian faith, may have perished when the killer waves struck.

Following the Dec. 26 tsunami Indian authorities have refused permission for international volunteer agencies seeking to go beyond Port Blair to carry out relief work on the grounds that they do not want the aborigines to be disturbed in any way.

Besides the need to protect the aborigines, the Andaman and Nicobar islands bristles with defence installations and has since 2001 supported a joint-service command involving elements of the army, navy air force and coast guard under a single commander.

How the official mind works - a revealing letter

by "ANONYMOUS"

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

7 Jan 2005

Some security aspects of the widespread tragedy caused by the Tsunami of December 26, 2004, have not received the attention they deserve.

The Andaman and Nicobar island territory of India, which has been the most affected in India, is inhabited by a large number of settlers from mainland India in the Andaman District. The Car Nicobar group of islands, which is less developed and more isolated, despite its strategic importance as the widow on South-East Asia and a watch-tower on the Malacca Straits, is largely inhabited by indigenous tribals.

Going by media reports, there seems to be a perception that the relief and rehabilitation measures for the local tribals are not as satisfactory as those for the people from the mainland. While this is due to extraordinary difficulties arising from the isolation of some of the islands and the almost total disruption of shipping transport services for the first few days after the Tsunami struck the islands on December 26, 2004, there seems to be an unfortunate perception of governmental inadequacy in rushing to the relief of the native tribals.

Taking advantage of this, Western non-governmental organisations seem to be exercising pressure on the Govt. of India to let them go into Car Nicobar to attend to the relief and rehabilitation needs of the tribals. Keeping in view the strategic importance of the area, the Government of India has rightly rejected their demands. Its refusal to let them go in would carry conviction with the international community only if it steps up on a crash basis its own efforts.

If the Western NGOs continue to give sermons to India on its obligation to let them go into Car Nicobar, New Delhi should not hesitate to tell them to first go to the US Naval base in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to estimate the humanitarian needs of the people there.

The havoc wrought by the Tsunami has led to an admirable outpouring of international assistance and sympathy for which the countries of the region have reasons to be grateful. The UN should have taken over the leadership of this massive international aid effort. Instead, the US has taken over the leadership and has reportedly roped in India too as its partner. US naval ships and military personnel have started moving into the affected countries to organise the relief effort. It has been reported that about 1,300 US Marines are likely to be deployed in Sri Lanka alone.

India has done well to reject US and West European offers of assistance. It has enough financial, material and human resources of its own to be able to take care of the relief and rehabilitation needs of its population, whether on the mainland or in the island territory.

The large-scale deployment of highly visible US troops in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand could make them attractive targets for Al Qaeda, the Jemmah Islamiyah and other jihadi terrorist organisations and add to the internal security problems of the affected countries. It would be wishful-thinking to believe that because of the enormous tragedy, the jihadi terrorists will refrain from acts of terrorism in the Tsunami-ravaged countries due to a fear that this could antagonise the local population.

They have never cared for public opinion and fears of public revulsion have never been an inhibiting factor for them. The tragedy in Thailand has not prevented the jihadi terrorists from continuing with their acts of terrorism in the Muslim majority provinces of southern Thailand.

Rescue and relief operations continue

Andaman and Nicobar Administration Press Release

received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

6 Jan 2005

17 people were rescued from a remote location in West Bay of Katchal Island. Sorties were carried out for dropping relief materials by air as well as for delivery of relief materials at places like Campbell Bay. The operational head of Integrated Relief Command viz. Lt. Gen. B.S.Thakur, conducted personal inspection of the progress of delivery of relief materials at Katchal and Camorta.

The total number of human bodies disposed off has been reported as 1,196. The number of persons evacuated from their locations to safer location is 11,565 so far. 3,610 persons have left for mainland in the aircraft returning after delivery of relief materials. The number of missing persons is 5,592.

There are 104 Relief Camps/locations in Nicobars with 32,962 persons. There are 14 Relief Camps in Port Blair with 4221 persons. There are 7 Relief Camps in Little Andaman with about 7000 persons. Thus about 44,183 persons are staying in 125 Relief Camps.

Dr Shukla of India Meteorological Department has come to Port Blair to undertake study of the earthquakes. A team from IIT Chennai is visiting theinfrastructure facilities for assessing their structural strength and to advise regarding their restoration.

Psychiatrists/Councilors from organizations like NIMHANS, Bangalore have been deployed by the Health Department at different places.

28 numbers of NGOs have come forward for providing assistance to the earthquake/Tsunami victims. All the Relief Camps in Port Blair are being maintained with the help of NGOs.

The State Governments of Maharashtra, Karnataka, West Bengal and NCT of Delhi have sent their relief materials which are being received and dispatched to the affected areas.

The naval vessel (INS) Sharabh which is carrying relief materials sent by Govt. of Karnataka is expected to reach Camorta today evening.

Various Naval and Coast Guard ships with helicopters onboard carried out the rescue & relief operations. They include Naval Ships Rajput, Shandhyak and Coast Guard Ship Kanklata Barua operating off Campbell Bay. In addition to this Naval Ships Darshak, LCU 38 and Trinkat are operating in the Nancowry Group of islands while Kumbhir is operating at Hutbay. The Indian Naval Tanker Ship Jyoti is proceeding to the southern group of islands with relief stores. The relief operations will get additional prop up by INS Brahmaputra the front line frigate of Indian Navy with its two integrated Chetak helicopters, joining the relief operations on the morning of 07th Jan.

Air Force launched 16 sorties of MI-8 & MI-17 helicopters to transfer relief materials, BSNL equipment along with 6 engineers to Kardip and Kutchal islands. 06 sorties of AN-32 & IL-76 operated for transportation of relief store to southern group and evacuation of personnel to mainland.745 Squadron of Coast Guard undertook 4 Dorniers sorties for transportation of equipment, generator, Medical Teams and Scientists to Campbell Bay.

Helicopter search for Shompen tribes is being undertaken and two Marine Commandos of Indian Navy along-with local guides were dropped in the area.The Naval divers undertook survey of Campbell Jetty for assessing the usability of the Jetty and early restoration of the services. 14 Relief Camps have been established at Campbell Bay with a total strength of 4,678.

The ITBP team carried out ground recee and found 19 survivors at Kutchal islands.

The survey ship of Indian Navy INS Darshak is on passage to Camorta islands with provisions, water, blankets, petrol, medicines and personnel for restoring the normalcy. LCU-38 disembarked one platoon each of Garhwal Riffles and J&K Riffles of Army on Camorta Island for rescue & relief operations.

Air force, Navy and Coast Guard flew a total of 16 sorties today to transfer material and personnel to southern group of Islands.

First named hero of the tsunami disaster

Received from SANE (Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology)

6 Jan 2005

This is Abdul Razak, a Radio Officer, in the Port Management Board posted at the Port Control Tower, Teressa Island. He knew about the Tsunami from watching TV and hearing wireless messages in general. On the 26th early morning, he was at the control tower when he heard on the wireless that an 8.9 intensity earthquake had taken place near Sumatra. He wondered whether this could trigger a Tsunami. While coming down on the ladder, he looked at the sea and thought that the sea appeared to be boiling.

He feared that a Tsunami was coming. On his moped, he went all around the island warning people to move to a higher ground. This saved the lives of many human beings on Teressa.

We salute him.

Samir Acharya, SANE

Military beginning to get help to people

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

6 Jan 2005

India's military is building emergency helicopter landing pads in the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands to speed up relief efforts following the tsunami. Officials say the priority is faster delivery of food, water and medicine to Katchal island, where almost 5,000 people are dead or missing. But the remoteness of many islands is slowing the relief operation, and hopes of finding survivors are fading. India's death toll is 9,691, with most of those confirmed dead in Tamil Nadu.

The BBC's Jonathan Charles in the Andaman Islands says that tsunami survivors in remote areas - which take days to reach by sea - cannot wait long for help.

Two-thirds of the population in Katchal island of the Nicobar islands - which lies close to the epicentre of the 26 December earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra - are either dead or missing. Those who survived are now living in the open, after their homes were destroyed.

The Indian military says that more than 6,000 people are still missing throughout the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago. More than 900 are known to have died.

'Speedy' response

"We will continue to search until the slightest hope. But 98% of all the survivors, we believe we have got them with us," Vice Admiral Raman Puri told reporters in the islands' capital, Port Blair, where many survivors are in refugee camps. All inhabited islands have been visited. There is nothing that has not been visited. We cannot give up hope and our boys are still scouring the jungles but we will call off the search after a week," he said.

The Indian government, which has been reluctant to seek international help, says its relief and rescue operation has been effective. "India's response to the disaster was extremely prompt," said Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran. "We are confident that we have the capabilities and resources to overcome it."

The authorities have been criticised for not allowing foreign aid organisations into the Andamans.

On Wednesday, however, it was announced that the UN children's fund Unicef had been granted access to vaccinate against measles in refugee camps.

"We started in Port Blair... and we will continue also to the other islands from this afternoon upon request of the government," Dr Marzio Babille, chief of health for Unicef in India told the Associated Press.

Katchal: Eaten away

Officials say Katchal was swept several times by the giant waves on 26 December. More than half the island is still submerged, and geologists fear much of it may have been eaten away by the sea. The authorities say 3,912 people have been rescued from Katchal. About 60% of the island's pre-disaster population were aboriginals.

Hundreds of Indian border guards have been flown in to help the navy and police search for those missing.

India's authorities say a missing person will not be officially listed as dead unless their body is found - preventing or delaying compensation pay-outs. The islands are home to a number of tribes, some of whom have had little or no contact with the outside world.

There was anger on Wednesday after India's Supreme Court lifted a ban on tree-felling on the islands to help rebuilding efforts. Environmentalists say the six-month lifting of the ban will encourage loggers and others to destroy forests which cover more than 80% of the archipelago.

India's Zoological Survey also plans a detailed survey to determine the extent of any damage to coral reefs.

SupremeCourt order concerning the felling of trees following the tsunami disaster

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

5 Jan 2005

Below is the full text of the 5 Jan 2005 order of the Supreme Court, relaxing some of its earlier orders of 7 May 2002:

WP (c ) No. 202 /1995
TN Godavarman Thirumulpad - Petitioner(S)
Versus
Union of India & Ors - Respondent (S)

(Report of CEC regarding permission sought by the Andman and Nicobar Administration for felling of trees etc. for rehabilitation of victims of earthquake and tsunami waves)

Date: 05/01/2005 This petition was mentioned today

CORAM:
Hon'ble Mr. Justice YK Sabharwal
Hon'ble Mr. Justice DM Dharmadhikari

For Petitioners : Mr. Uday Lalit, Sr. Adv. (AC)
Mr. Sidhartha Choudhary, Adv. (AC)

For MoEF: Mr. AND Rao, Adv.

Upon hearing counsel the court made the following ORDER

The Central Empowered Committee has submitted a report dated 4th January, 2005 seeking permission for felling of trees etc. The matter has been mentioned considering the early steps to be taken for rehabilitation of the victims of earthquake and tsunami waves. From the report is appears that Andaman and Nicobar Administration, Department of Environment and Forests wrote a letter dated 3rd January, 2005 to the Member Secretary of the Central Empowered Committee seeking permission for extraction of timber and non timber forest produce for rehabilitation of victims of earthquake and tsunami waves which rocked the islands on 26th December, 2004. List this report for consideration on the next date of hearing of the forest matters, namely 28th January, 2005. But, giving regard to the urgency of the matter, as an interim measure, accepting the suggestions in the report for carrying out rehabilitation measures as above, the order dated 7th May, 2002 is relaxed to the limited extent and the following is permitted:

(i) Extraction of timber and non timber forest produce from the forest area including deemed forest and allotted land for the time being without approved working plan for a period of six months for meeting the immediate requirement for reconstruction / repair of houses, setting up of relief camps, repair of jetties, bridges, public buildings and related matters subject to the following conditions:

a) no felling will be done (I) upto 1000 mtr from the sea shore, (ii) in the national parks and sanctuaries, and (iii) in mangrove forests:
b) the felling will be exclusively for meeting the immediate requirement of rehabilitation work and not for any commercial purpose;
c) proportionate reduction in the subsequent felling will be made while implementing the prescriptions of the working plan to adjust the present felling and
d) the location, quantity and actual utilisation of felling / removal will be monitored by a committee not below the level of Chief Conservator of Forests. The said committee will also be responsible to provide monthly details of felling and utilisation timber and non timber produce

(ii) Conversion of round timber into sawn timber to be carried out in the closed private saw mills for a period of six months subject to the following:

a) the saw mills will be hired by the Forest Department / Corporation for processing timber on job work basis for a limited period of six months;
b) no license will be granted or deemed to have been granted to such saw mills;
c) the saw mills will be used exclusively for meeting the immediate requirement of rehabilitation work and not for any commercial purpose;
d) appropriate guidelines shall be formulated by the forest department to regulate and monitor their operations

(iii) Use of forest land for restoring road and communication links for a period of six months subject to the following:

a) The use of forest land will be restricted to the areas where the existing road and communication links have been completely destroyed and new allignment is totally unavoidable i.e. to provide an alternate bare minimum link in place of the earlier one. This permission will not be constituted to set up altogether new network of roads or for widening of existing roads;
b) This permission will not apply to area falling inside national parks and sanctuaries
c) Wherever the forest land is to be used on a permanent basis, the approval under the FC Act will have to be obtained at the earliest;
d) The permission is only for replacing the existing road and communication network and not for developing any new road / communication network

(iv) Removal for sand from beaches for the purpose of buildings / road construction etc. for a period of six months subject to the following:

a) Total quantity of sand removed from the beaches will not exceed the upper limit permitted by this court by order dated 7th May 2002.
b) No removal will be done from national parks and sanctuaries

The response to the report, if any, may be filed by the Ministry of Environment and Forests and / or any other concerned party by 24th January, 2005.

Signed

N. Annapurna
(court Master)

V.P. Tyagi
(Court Master)

Supreme Court allows timber felling to help tsunami victims

by KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

5 Jan 2005

The Supreme Court has relaxed its order banning felling of trees from forests and allowed the administration to use timber for rehabilitation of tsunami victims in Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

However no felling will be allowed up to 1,000 metres from the sea shore in the national park and sanctuary and the mangrove forest.

The Court said relaxation of its May 7, 2002 order to completely stop removal of timber from forest areas, would be in operation for six months.

Rehabilitation efforts

An application had been moved by the Central Empowered Committee (CEC), which had been approached by authorities in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands seeking help.

The authorities had sought permission to allow felling and utilisation of timber and non-timer forest produce like bamboo in the Andamans.

The timber could then be used for reconstruction/repair of houses, setting up of relief camps, repair of jetties, bridges and public buildings that were severely damaged by the 26 December tsunami.

Situation in (mostly) the Nicobar islands

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

5 Jan 2005

Rescuers in India's Andaman and Nicobar archipelago are searching for half the population of an island who have been missing since the December tsunami.

About 4,500 people are unaccounted for on Katchal island, many of them tribals presumed swept away by waves.

Teams are also clearing debris on Car Nicobar island. India's Supreme Court has lifted a ban on tree-felling on the islands to help rebuilding efforts.

Relief teams in Tamil Nadu are shifting from rescue to rehabilitation work.

Swept several times Nearly 7,000 Andaman and Nicobar islanders are confirmed as dead or missing.

The rest of our people have been eaten away by the sea.

Puthukumar, Katchal survivor

Officials say Katchal was swept several times by the giant waves which followed the 26 December earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra. More than half of Katchal is still submerged, and geologists fear much of it may have been eaten away by the sea.

Andaman chief administrator Ram Kapse says 3,912 people have been rescued from Katchal.

Arrivals in Port Blair say people elsewhere are starving. Fifty-eight people were airlifted to the capital, Port Blair, for treatment. But the remaining 4,500 or so inhabitants are classed as "missing". About 60% of the island's population are tribals.

"We are trying to find them and making a hell of an effort," Andamans military commander Lt Gen Bhupinder Singh Thakur said.

Hundreds of Indian border guards have been flown in to help the navy and police search for those missing.

By Wednesday, just six bodies had been found. Hopes of finding survivors are not high.

India tsunami toll

Tamil Nadu - 7,923 confirmed dead

Andamans - 901confirmed dead

Pondicherry - 583 confirmed dead

Kerala - 170 confirmed dead

Andhra Pradesh - 105 confirmed dead

Another 6,107 classed as missing on mainland India, plus another 6010 in the Andaman and Nicobar islands

"The rest of our people have been eaten away by the sea," one Katchal survivor, Puthukumar, told the BBC.

India's authorities say a missing person will not be officially listed as dead unless their body is found - complicating the compensation issue.

"Though your family members are actually dead, missing at sea for months, you will not get compensation," one campaigner, Basudev Das, told the BBC.

Citizens' rights groups want the government to declare missing islanders dead if no body is found in the next fortnight.

Clear-up

Elsewhere in the archipelago, a huge operation to shift debris was under way.

On Wednesday, helicopters airlifted a bulldozer and other heavy machinery to the northern island of Car Nicobar, which was badly hit in the disaster.

Soldiers in masks helped a bulldozer shovel mounds of rubble, digging out decomposing bodies and crushed possessions, rescuers told Reuters news agency.

Great Andamanese remnant tribe moved to Port Blair

Received from Survival International
6 Charterhouse Buildings
London EC1M 7ET, UK
Tel: (+44) (0)20 7687 8700
Fax: (+44) (0)20 7687 8701
www.survival-international.org

5 Jan 2005

One of the four 'Negrito' tribes of the Andaman Islands, the Great Andamanese, have been moved to the Islands' capital, Port Blair, by the local authorities.

The 43 Great Andamanese, already the most decimated of all the Andaman tribes, were living in a government settlement on Strait Island, but their village suffered serious damage in the tsunami.

The Great Andamanese population was estimated at 5,000 in 1848, but plummeted following settlement by the British, who cut down their forest, stole their land and killed their game. The British colonial authorities established a 'home' in Port Blair where they kept captured Great Andamanese. Of 150 Great Andamanese children born in the home, none survived beyond the age of two.

In 1970 the Indian government moved the 30 surviving Great Andamanese to a settlement on Strait Island - they have been totally dependent on the authorities for food, clothing and shelter ever since. Their population, however, has started to increase once again.

The Jarawa and Sentinelese tribes, in contrast, have continued to live self-sufficiently on their own land. The Sentinelese resist all contact with outsiders, and the Jarawa did so until very recently.

A Survival spokeswoman, Miriam Ross, said today, 'We hope that the Great Andamanese will be able to return soon to Strait Island. In the long term, they need to be able to regain some measure of self-sufficiency. Their fate serves as a warning of what could happen to the other tribes of the Islands if their territories are not properly protected.'

Speaking to Survival in 2004, a Great Andamanese woman named Lichu voiced her fears for the fate of one of the most isolated of the Andaman tribes, the Jarawa. 'I think what happened to us is going to happen to the Jarawa too? lots of settlers are hunting in the Jarawa area. There is not enough game left for the Jarawa.'

The first relief ship to Nancowry (Nicobars) and detailed situation report

by DENIS GILES

5 Jan 2005

Indian Defence and Andaman Administration Injects Feeling of Discrimination Among the Victims

Two days after the tsunami incident on 28th Dec. 2004, the confused Andaman & Nicobar Administration decided to send a 'Relief' ship to the Nancowry Group via Car Nicobar, which is the worst affected in the island chain of the Nicobar district.

It was announced over the All India Radio early in the morning that the passenger ship MV Sentinal will be carrying relief materials to the Nancowry Group. Passengers who wished to go to Nancowry and Car Nicobar to get a first hand account of their relatives held up in the islands were allowed. Meanwhile the news was spread that the ship would be carrying food grains, medicines, clothes and water for the victims of tsunami.

Although the scheduled programme for the sailing was announced as 12.00 noon on the 28th of December, 2004 but the ship could sail only at 11.15 pm, i.e. more than eleven hours of the scheduled time. To the surprise of all on board, the ship could manage to load only 15 tonnes of rice in it as against the news of the 'relief items' spread among the public.

The 'Relief' ship took more than fourteen hours to reach Car Nicobar where hundreds of people especially the tribes who did not have access to the runway had gathered and waited the shattered Mus Jetty, amidst the debris of the destroyed government buildings. The first rescue boat was lowered at around 4.30 pm from the mother vessel which had in it 6 to 7 crew members. It took almost an hour for this rescue boat to reach the Mus jetty. But then when it returned, it could bring only 50 out of the hundreds who were waiting at the jetty, fearing another tsunami. Many among the victims brought on board the mother vessel were ladies and children while the men remained at the jetty, expecting a second rescue boat.

As soon as the first 50 victims got on board, there was an announcement made by the Captain of the ship that "no more passengers will be allowed". The explanation given to the crew had made them believe that the ship had to immediately sail for Nancowry, where the urgency was more. No more rescue trips were made and the ship sailed further.

On 30th of December, 2004 the ship reached Camorta. It was 8.00 AM. There was no sign of any movement inside Camorta where the Officers of the Administration waited. Signal was sent by the Captain to the Assistant Commissioner that the ship has arrived and has 15 tonnes of cargo which needs to be immediately unloaded. Since the jetty was half under water and was occupied by speed boats MV Katchal and MV Long Island apart from the Navy ships, there was no chance for the 'Relief' ship to go near the harbour.

By then few country boats were seen moving around from one island to another loaded with passengers. Initially it gave an impression that the boats were bringing passengers to board on to the ship. But soon it was realised that the native tribals were trying to rescue the held up people in various islands and shifting them to Camorta, the headquarter of Nancowry. Somehow I could manage to hop in a boat which was going to Champin island to rescue a pregnant tribal lady.

On reaching Champin, I could see not even a single structure that was safe. Most of them were submerged completely inside the sea and the remaining had only stilts on the ground. A huge boat had drifted inside the village. Dead animals could be seen floating on sea and there was no trace of life in the entire area. The pregnant lady was brought to the boat which already had around 25 passengers with their bags filled with clothes and water bottles.

I could find an old man, huddled amidst the passengers. On enquiring, he narrated the how the waves had wiped out the entire Champin village within a span of 6 minutes, leaving nothing behind. As the boat moved, I suggested the old man to take the pregnant lady to the ship which had a doctor and the needed medical aids. But no single person agreed to my suggestion and hurried the lady to Camorta, which had a Community Health Centre. On continuous persistence, a boy next to me said, "we don't know where this ship will dump us if we get on board."

I landed at Camorta and it was 11.30 AM. Few men were seen near the submerged jetty which still had water upto the waist level. The portion of the jetty that was visible above water had major cracks and could fall at any time. As I walked inside the island I saw few non tribals selling tea, pan and beedies at double the rate, trying to make the best use of the situation. On moving further, I could see people sitting on the road. Their body was covered with clothes that hardly fit to their size, indicating they had borrowed it.

Further up on a hillock, hundreds of tribals after having escaped from various islands had gathered on a school ground. It was hot and the people had made small tents out of bed sheets and available clothes. Inside were small children, thirsting for water yet chanting prayers… "la illha il allah! Mohammed ur rasul allah…" On one side the children were chanting prayers and on the other side their parents had radio sets close to their ears. It was 11.50 AM and there was a terrifying announcement on the radio, "the water is going to rise and the people near the shores are requested to evacuate the shore area…"

The news on the radio had brought an expression of terror on the faces of all those present at the school ground. When I tried to move, the natives stopped me and pleaded, "please don't move… there is an announcement on the radio… the water is so powerful that it can pull with it any thing that comes on its way…" I had no other choice than to wait upto 12.30 PM along with them, just watching their reaction over the announcement aired by the All India Radio.

After things started getting normal, I tried to interview the victims of the devastating tsunami. They were from different island, some from Katchal which has only three small villages remaining viz Mill Dera, Beach Dera and Salo Tekri. Some explained, "the place is stinking but only few dead bodies can be seen. Rest were under fallen trees or inside the debris of concrete buildings, they guessed. A Police Radio Operator who was posted at Katchal and managed to make his way upto the ship explained, "at around 6.30 there was a huge tremor. I went strait to my office and communicated about the tremor to the Assistant Commissioner at Nancowry. Then I was talking to the Station House Officer of my area. We were only talking and within 10 minutes there was a second tremor. We ran outside the building and saw a wave almost 10 meter high. We started running towards the jungle… and reached a place called Salo Tekri. The wave couldn't reach us but to the shock of all present there was another wave much higher than the first that followed. It pushed me deep inside the jungle and I managed to hold on to a dead cow that had died during the first wave and floated next to me. The wave subsided and I ran upto Mill Dera which appeared to be safe. For the next two days no one came to rescue us. On 28th a ferry boat Bul Bul came from Camorta. Around 180 survivors made their way on the boat and were brought to Camorta.

"After reaching Camorta, I enquired with the Assistant Commissioner about the programme of MV Sentinal but he just avoided talking to anybody. The rumour was spread that the ship will unload the cargo and water it carried and will return without any passengers… There was absolutely no reply from the officers who were supposedly handling the situation. I do not even know whether I will be taken on board Sentinal ship or not…

"There were 15 Government establishments that do not exist now…. There is nothing left…"

Similar experiences were narrated by many others who had escaped from Katchal. A teacher named Mr. Vaidyanathan who was posted at Katchal said, "it was like a whirlpool. The waves not only pushed us but had left us all naked. There were no clothes on our body. The ladies had to cover their bodies using leaves until the people from the unaffected villages lent clothes to them.

Almost all whom I could interview were totally disappointed with the performance of the Administration… that did not provide any information to the public.

It was 2.00 pm and at the Assistant Commissioner's Office at Camorta… the officers were sipping tea and trying to count the number of country boats available in the area instead of instructing the speed boats to unload the relief that was brought. Mr. Uday Kumar, Officer on Special Duty at Camorta asked me who I am. After telling him that I am a journalist he gave a welcome smile, and ordered the peon to get me a chair… He said, "so what do you want to know…" and I asked, its been 6 hours after the ship has arrived. Why don't you send the people to board the ship and order to unload the cargo? And there came a reply in a 'least bothered tone', "please take rest and try to relax… we can talk about it later…"

Not able to digest the reaction of the officer, I walked to the ground where I met a boy named Aslam who had tears in his eyes as he looked at me. On talking to him I gathered that Aslam was at Terassa at the time of the incident. He explained, "it was around 6.30 in the morning and we were inside the house. My father was listening to the radio. Suddenly my father came and woke us up and told us to run. Within no time I could see people rushing out of their houses. We were divided into groups. People were shouting from all directions… run… the water is rising… We were all running up to the hill and I could sea huge wave rushing towards us. It swallowed many people who died. Only the 'Bengali' village remained and there was no news of the other 8 villages in the island.

For the next three days we were on the hillock. There was no water… children were dying of hunger. They even went to the extent of eating any rot that came their way. We tried to stop them but then who can control hunger?

On the third day there was a Navy Ship arrived. We ran towards it expecting relief but they said, "we are not here for relief operation but have come for a survey of the island." But at the same time it was being announced on the radio that relief has been sent to all the islands… which shocked us. It was all false news that was broadcasted on the radio by the Administration.

On the fourth day a country boat came to the island and rescued us by making trips after trips to Camorta. But then at Camorta it is worse… the attitude of the officers will kill us. We are not dying due to the tremor and waves but due to hunger.

After Aslam I could talk to Mrs. Ayesha Majid, the Chairperson Tribal Council Nancowry. She too was at Terassa on 28th when the water rose. She said, "We came from Terassa expecting some help from the Administration. We were told that the phone lines were working here water supply was regained. I was worried about my people who were in different places. I thought atleast after reaching Camorta we can know about their whereabouts.

"The Assistant Commissioner and other government officers do not even care to listen to us. They are avoiding us because we are tribals. If this is the case, please I request you to convey our message to the Administration, not to bother about us. Let us all die here because we are tribals. If this is the kind of help provided by the Administration, it would be better if we die. We hear on radio that the Administration is doing a lot for the victims but even after four days there are people dying here.

In Terassa, only the non-tribals were rescued by the Administration. There are other villages of there which has tribals but Administration is least bothered. Our children are dying in front of us and we cannot bear it. Please request the Administration to talk to us directly about what they have done for us and what does it expect out of us. At the least I can expect that the Administration will not be spreading wrong news over the radio.

Don't we have the right to expect anything from the Administration. We hoist the flag of India and announce that we are Indians but then India is least bothered about we tribals. India does not consider us at all. Instead it is helping other countries. We heard over the radio that the Prime Minister has done this and that… Sonia Gandhi has done this… But what have they done for us? I just pray to you to convey this message to the Prime Minister so that they can atleast have pity on us…"

After the interview went back to the ship. It was 4.00 PM and there were no passengers on board. The Assistant Commissioner had spread a rumour that the ship won't be carrying any passengers and on top of it the warning over the radio has sent every one back inside the island.

Some time later there were nearly 10 country boats that came to the ship. It was packed with people and almost all of them were non-tribals. Passengers started getting on board but soon the Captain stood on the Gangway and ordered the crew to stop taking further passengers. The decision of the Captain had created a fury among the crew on board and the passengers waiting at the open sea. In many cases, the children were on board while the parents were still held up at sea. The reason that the Captain had was that the ship had to pick passengers from Car Nicobar too and it is growing dark. Moreover officers at Nancowry had confused the people thereby delaying the ship.

The order of the Captain was received great protest from all on board. The situation had made the crew revolt against the Captain to collect the passenger. Meanwhile the left out passengers had gone back to Camorta and threatened the Administration's officers. The revolt of the crew and on the other hand the revolt of the passengers at Camorta forced the Officer on Special Duty to stop the sailing ship and send all the left out passengers on the island.

The next day on 31st December, the 'mercy' ship reached Car Nicobar. The Captain had no say and the crew lowered the rescue boat to bring maximum people who were left during the first trip.

In Car Nicobar, having managed an entry in the rescue boat, I reached the jetty and then walked inside. There were debris all over and nothing else. There was a troop of the India Reserve Battalion who was brought to the island on 28th Dec. two days after the incident.

On talking to the Commander of the Battalion I gathered that they have been dumped in a corner of Car Nicobar without any communication equipment. The Battalion had cleared 15 Kilometers of road by burying the dead bodies. They even shared the food they brought for them with the natives of Mus village and Small Lapathy which were cut off from the rest of the island after the tsunami.

Meanwhile the 1st Captain of Mus Village also the Secretary of the Tribal Council of Car Nicobar Mr. Thomas Phillip was there and in his interview, he explained, "the first to land in the area was the Military. We expected help but they just rushed to the Airport side. There is no help from the Administration yet apart from sending the ship MV Sentinal to our place. We have already conveyed our message through the Education Officer Mr. Nathaniel who left Car Nicobar day before. But there is no relief. The children are starving here and hadn't the IRBn (India Reserve Battalion) helped we would have died of starvation. The Military had assured that they would drop some ration for us but it is five days now and no one helped us except the IRBn who parted with their share. Even today the villagers came to me for food and I had to tell them I don't have any stock with me.

I expect you to convey the message to the Administration that we are starving here. On the very first day after the Military, a Navy ship had come here. They called us and made us work as labours, lifting their things and then forced me to sign on a receipt that read… received all six items… rice, sugar, coffee powder, medicines etc. In return they gave me few chapattis and dhal."

During the entire journey upto Nancowry and back I met many more people. The Captain of Trinket Island who was at Camorta. He explained that his island is torn into three pieces. Lot of them died and how they escaped from there. There were complaints from all over and almost all the people were totally against the working of the Administration and the Defence. It was even narrated that the Defence were airlifting not only their staff but also the influential men and even dogs. More than five days are over after the incident and the relief flooding into Port Blair remain unaccounted. Many might have died by now due to starvation and many may be on the verge of dying. Tsunami has not only caused thousands of life but the Defence and the Andaman Administration by its acts have injected the feeling of discrimination among the victims.

Suggested essential measures

Published by SANE (Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology)

5 Jan 2005

Quick nautical survey by naval hydrographers: from the reports received from various parts of the island, it appears that there have been widespread changes in the sea bed contour. The changes include shifting sand bars, rise of mud flats, and changes in the depth of water.

It is suggested that the chief hydrographic be requested to deploy at least two survey ships to record the changes and effect temporary corrections in the nautical charts. The information should also be given immediately to the administration to enable realistic planning.

Monitor changes in faults close to the Andaman Islands: Some geologists, in view of the recent series of earthquakes of moderate intensity originating in the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal, are of the opinion that the local fault is perhaps changing due to stress and strain. We should put geologists to work on this possibility as it could have serious repercussions in the future.

Reinstate water resources like wells in Nicobar: a) Water in Car Nicobar Island was traditionally sourced from local wells. The surge of tsunami had brought in a large amount of sea water in the wells. Pumping out the brackish water from the wells till the waters turns fresh again will be the right answer that will also be sustainable. A few five horsepower pumps could do this well and fast, thereby reducing or eliminating the need for bringing in packaged water. The system should work as we have seen that the well in the Mazar which was also inundated by sea water has now been restored in the same manner.

b) Spring and mullah in Little Andaman: The water sources at Ramakrishnapuram are intact and not affected by the tsunami. Laying a pipeline/flexible pipe quickly can solve the problem.

It will be necessary to test the water for its safety and add chlorine in the form of tablets or liquid at the rate of 2 ppm will prevent diarrhoeal diseases.

Village-based groups of volunteers in Nicobar to work with one or two non-tribal volunteers with each group: We have interacted with several captains and community leaders of Car Nicobar and found that there was a widespread fear of the island sinking. That is why they all wanted to take up residence elsewhere. The fear is based on the perception that all the educated and empowered people (non-tribals) had left the island in a hurry. A few volunteers from outside living and working in the area will dispel the fear and reinstate the confidence. We suggest attaching two volunteers to each village to work closely with local young tribal volunteers for rehabilitation and eco-restoration.

Gender sensitivity in camps : Concept of one village-one camp (encouraging self help): The social systems in the Nicobari villages are highly structured under a recognized leadership. Ideally people from a single village should be located in a single camp. Under this system, those living in camps will at least have the security of living among their own people even if they are translocated. We believe this will greatly promote the spirit of self help. This will also eliminate the possible danger of gender discrimination or insensitivity to traditional mores.

Information dissemination through NGOs (need for an information center): Everyday we are getting 40 to 50 visits from media, NGOs and other interested people for information. The administration is so engrossed in disaster management, and rightly so, that it will be unfair to expect the administration to divert resources for this purpose. SANE is already doing it unofficially. We offer our services to be your interface to answer such enquiries and provide information. If agreed, we suggest close liaison between SANE and the NGO cell set up by the administration.

Definite planning for garbage removal and debris dumping: While the need for the removal of the debris in the areas most affected is paramount, one needs to realize that this debris could lead to a greater problem in the long run. We suggest identifying specific areas for dumping this debris temporarily on land till a permanent method of disposal could be identified.

A lot of plastic and paper garbage carrying relief material is accumulating in around the affected areas. We suggest collection of the waste and packing those in the cartons in which relief materials are being shipped in. The collected waste should be brought back to Port Blair by the relief ships on their return voyage.

In the year 2002, following the earthquake in Diglipur, we had brought out an issue of our newsletter specifically addressed to the problem of earthquakes and tsunamis, suggesting the need for a community-based disaster management plan. A copy of the same is enclosed.

North Sentinel island coral reef now exposed in geological uplift

by DIAMOND DAVE
Diamonddavej@Hotmail.com

5 Jan 2005

This is an Indian Coast Guard picture of North Sentinel Island taken after the earthquake-tsunami:

The coral reef is now exposed. It appears that the seabed and island was uplifted by 3-5 metres.

This indicates that the island was not struck by the tsunami but was part of the uplift that generated the tsunami that affected other areas.

First confirmed news on isolated tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar islands

Published by fPcN
bongo@fPcN-global.org

Received from RUEDI SUTER
ruedi.suter@mediaspace.ch

5 Jan 2005

The first authoritative reports are now coming in on the fate of the five isolated tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, hit hard by the Asian quake disaster. All appear to have survived. The more numerous Nicobarese tribe, however, has suffered huge loss of life.

The 270 Jarawa, who lived in complete isolation until recently, appear to have escaped unharmed. They almost certainly were living in the forest when the tsunami struck.
Most of the Onge, who live in two government-built settlements, fled to high ground as the sea level fell, and so survived. Their awareness of the ocean and its movements has been accumulated over 60,000 years of inhabiting the islands.
Reports from overflights of Sentinel Island, home of the most isolated of all the tribes, the Sentinelese, indicate that many have been seen on the beaches. The Sentinelese fired arrows at the helicopter overhead. However, confident assertions by the authorities that all the Sentinelese have been accounted for are premature, as no-one has any idea of their population (estimates range from 50 - 250), and landing on the island is impossible.
No reliable reports have yet been received on the fate of the 41 Great Andamanese, but early indications are that they have survived more or less intact.
Similarly, there has been no reliable information on the fate of the 380-strong Shompen, an isolated tribe of Great Nicobar Island.

The sixth group of the islands, the 30,000-strong Nicobarese, have suffered much more. All 12 villages on one island, Car Nicobar, have been washed away, and many are feared dead. Unlike the others, the Nicobarese are not hunter-gatherers but horticulturalists, and have largely converted to Christianity.

Whale/dolphin suicides and earthquakes

by Dr. ARUNA.HALAM KUMAR
xedoc@sulekha.com

5 Jan 2005

It is my observation, confirmed over the years, that mass suicides of whales and dolphins that occur sporadically all over the world, are in some way related to change and disturbances in the electromagnetic field coordinates and possible re-alignments of geotectonic plates thereof.

Tracking the dates and plotting the locales of tremors and earthquakes, I am resonably certain, that major earthquakes usually follow within a week or two of mass breaching of cetacians. I have noted with alarm, the last week report of such mass deaths of marine mammals in an Australian beachside. I will not be surprised if withinn a few days a massive hits hits some part of the globe. The inter-relationship between the unusual 'death-wish' of pods of whales and its inevitable aftermath, the earthquake, may need a further impassioned and unbiased looking into.

Earthquake aftershock with magnitude 5.8 hit near Andaman Islands

Published by FREE PRESS NEWS SERVICES

Received from WILHELM KLEIN
wilhelmklein@web.de

5 Jan 2005

A 5.8-magnitude earthquake struck early today near India's Andaman Islands, an area repeatedly hit by aftershocks following the massive temblor and tsunami that devastated the region last week, the Hong Kong Observatory said. The quake, centred about 690 kilometres northwest of the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh, was recorded in Hong Kong at 3:20 a.m., the observatory said.

Help the Moken, sea gypsies of the Burmese-Thai coast

by TOM VATER
tomvater@yahoo.com

5 Jan 2005

the Moken sea gypsies of Ko Surin in Thailand, animist nomadic boat dwellers, have been sailing the Andaman Sea for centuries. Until last Sunday - when the big wave took everything they had - their village, their boats, their belongings.

The Moken knew the wave was coming and saved countless tourists. Eventually they were taken by police to the mainland where they have been lingering in a temple turned refugee camp since. Local powerbrokers are now deciding over their fate, squabbles have broken out about what should be done with them. The Moken want to return to Surin when it is safe.

Surin is utterly trashed but it is feasable to build a new village on a different beach on the islands.

If the Moken stay anywhere near this temple on the mainland, they will be forced to assimilate into Thai society - their unique culture wil be lost. Already there are grave concerns for the Moken kids running into the main road in front of the temple - they don't know what cars are.

The Moken badly need money to buy new boats, kitchen ware and tools. The National Park will have them back if they can sustain themselves.

For this reason, I am trying to raise some funds for them, something I have never done before in my life. Spending several days with them in the refugee temple and going out to the islands to see the carnage, hearing real heroic tales of survival, I felt like I was observing an entire culture on the brink of extinction.

Please make a donation, either into my account in the UK, which is easiest, or via a UNESCO website in Thailand. If you send many to my account, please send me an email also with the date and amount. I will send any moneys coming in to the academics running the UNESCO Andaman Pilot Project which has been active since 1997 to help the Moken help themselves. The lecturers and volunteers of this project, whom I have known since 1999, are trusted implicitly by the Moken. My wife Aroon , who lived with the Moken when I first met her, is in daily contact with the community and the UNESCO project.

Many thanks.

Lloyds TSB
Headington Branch
Branch No 30 94 04
Account No 00527679

From outside the UK you need these international banking numbers:
IBANGB83LOYD309404 00527679
BIC No: LOYD GB2L

Letter from the Nicobar tribal people to the Lt.Governor of the Andaman and Nicobar islands

4 Jan 2005

TO
THE HON'BLE LT. GOVERNOR,
A & N ISLANDS
RAJ NIVAS, PORT BLAIR

4 JAN 2005

HIS EXCELLENCY,

MOST RESPECTFULLY, WE SUBMIT THE FOLLOWING TO YOUR EXCELLENCY TO PLEASE TAKE IMMEDIATE NECESSARY ACTION AND YOUR KIND ATTENTION TOWARDS THE TRIBAL WHO HAVE BEEN SUFFERING PATHETICALLY BY THE BEHAVIOR OF ILLEGAL STAYING OF NON-TRIBAL IN OUR TRIBAL LAND.

THESE NON-TRIBAL HAVE BEEN LIVING IN TRIBAL'S AREA ILLEGALLY AND HAVE BROUGHT NUMBER OF OBSTACLES IN OUR DAY, TODAY'S LIFE. THE TIDAL WAVES HAVE DESTRUCTED SEVERAL LIVES AND WEALTH OF THE TRIBAL OUR LONG PENDING DEMAND AND REQUEST TO ADMINISTRATION IS TO REMOVE ALL THE NON-TRIBAL TO COME TO OUR ISLANDS TO ENCROACH OUR LAND OR START THEIR BUSINESS ILLEGALLY. WE HAVE NEVER CALLED THESE NON-TRIBALS TO COME TO OUR ISLANDS TO ENCROACH OUR LAND & DOING BUSINESS ILLEGALLY. NOW WE ARE THE VICTIM OF BEING A PEACE LOVING PEOPLE WITH GOOD HEART AND ADVANTAGES WAS TAKEN BY THE NON-TRIBAL AND ALSO VICTIM OF TSUNAMI WAVES. FIRST THEY HAVE ENTER OUR ISLAND ILLEGALLY, THAN THEY HAVE TAKEN AWAY OUR LAND, THAN OUR PEACE, THAN EXPLOITATION OF THE TRIBAL THAN CHEATING THE TRIBAL. THROUGH BUSINESS POLITICS, BUSINESS TACTICS, THAN SPREADING HATRED AMONGST THE SIMPLE TRIBAL, THAN THEY START USING THE POLICY DIVIDE AND RULE, THAN BLOCKING OUR ENTIRE FUTURE WITH MONEY IN VARIOUS PROFITABLE FIELDS. THAN THEY HAVE ORGANISED POLITICIANS.

NOW WHATEVER RELIEF MATERIALS THE ADMINISTRATION HAS RELEASED FOR THE TRIBAL VICTIMS OF TSUNAMI DISASTER, MAXIMUM BENEFITS HAS CLUTCHED BY THEM (NON-TRIBAL) AS THE TRIBAL DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO FIGHT AND INDEED, THEY HAVE BEEN THREATENING THE DISTRESS INNOCENT TRIBAL. NOW THESE NON-TRIBAL ARE FULLY TAKING ADVANCE OF THE SITUATION AS WE ARE PERSONS WHO GOT MOST AFFECTED BY THE TIDAL WAVES, NOW THEY ARE CUTTING THE FINGER/HAND OF OUR RELATIVES WHO IS DEAD TO TAKE AWAY GOLD RINGS, BANGLE AND THIS HAPPENED AT KATCHAL & TERESSA, THEY HAVE NOT EVEN LEFT THE DEAD BODY TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF IT . HOW CAN WE LIVE WITH THESE GREEDY NON-TRIBALS? THAN ROBBING MONEY FROM TRIBAL PATIENT (VICTIM OF TSUNAMI) FROM HOSPITAL, A RECENT CASE WITH THE TRIBAL PATIENTS FROM DARING VILLAGE

WHOWAS ROBBED RS.3000/- CASH BY TWO NON-TRIBAL FROM MILDERA IN THE CHC, NONCOWRIE. THE POOR TRIBAL PATIENTS HAD SOME HOW, ANY HOW MANAGE TO COMPLAIN TO DR.NARESH LALL, CMO AND THAN DR.NARESH CAME INTO FULL SWING WITH THOROUGH INVESTIGATION AND WAS SUCCESSFUL TO GET THIS TWO THIEVES NON-TRIBAL THE MONEY ROBBED WAS PUT INSIDE THE BENDAGE OF THEIR LEG AS THE NON-TRIBAL IS VERY CLEVER & CUNNING. THAN THESE NON-TRIBAL DURING LATE NIGHT AROUND 2.00 AM THEY START SHOUTING WATER (SEA) IS COMING AND POOR FEARFUL TRIBAL GETTING UP WITH SMALL-SMALL CHILDREN'S RUNNING. NOW THEY ARE SELLING ESSENTIALS ITEM AT VERY HIGH PRICE TO SIMPLE INNOCENT TRIBAL BY TAKING ADVANTAGES OF THE SITUATION. THEY START ACTING AS THEY ARE VERY SINCERE/HONEST IN FRONT OF ANY HONEST GOVT. OFFICERS OR POWERFUL PERSONS.

TILL TODAY THEY HAVE BEEN VERY SUCCESSFULLY IN CONVINCING THE ADMINISTRATION THROUGH POLITICIANS OR GOVT. OFFICERS OR THROUGH DIRECT CONTACT BY SAYING FALSE STORIES/SYMPATHETIC STORIES AND MAKING LOTS OF DRAMA AS THEY ARE GREAT FILM ACTOR TO SHOW/SUPPORT THEIR STAY IN TRIBAL AREA IS GENUINE IT HURT US AND VERY PAINFUL, WHENEVER WE HEAR THAT ADMINISTRATION IS SUPPORTING THEM THE LAW BREAKERS DUE TO POLITICIANS AND DUE THEIR TACTICS/ACTING OR DUE TO THEIR WONDERFUL STORIES. YOUR EXCELLENCY WE HAVE BEEN FAILURE BY ABIDING WITH THE LAW OF OUR LAND TO CONVINCE THE ADMINISTRATION FOR THEIR REMOVAL FROM OUR ISLANDS BECAUSE WE ARE SIMPLE PEOPLE WITH SIMPLE THINKING AND WE CANNOT ACT LIKE A FILM ACTOR LIKE THEM, WE CANNOT TELL FALSE STORIES LIKE THEM. BUT EVEN THOUGH WE HAVE BEEN KEPT TRYING OUR LEVEL BEST AGAIN & AGAIN REQUESTING YOUR EXCELLENCY TO PLEASE REMOVE THEM FROM OUR LAND PLEASE GIVE US JUSTICE BY REMOVING THEM. WE WILL WORK FOR OUR OWN SELF AS WE ARE CONTENTED PEOPLE WITH WHAT WE HAVE, PLEASE SAFE GUARD US TO LIVE LIFE IN OUR OWN WAY. WE NEED GOOD EDUCATION AT THE MOMENT WHICH REQUIRES LOTS OF TIME FOR US TO KNOW WHAT EXACTLY ABOUT THE FUTURE BUT TILL THAN PLEASE PROTECT US & SAFE GUARDS US FROM THESE NON-TRIBAL. WE TOO WANT DEVELOPMENT BUT NOT AS A SLAVES OF LAW BREAKERS(NON-TRIBAL) WHO HAD ILLEGALLY STAYING HERE. DEVELOPMENT DOESN'T MEAN THAT WE HAVE TO DESTROY OUR FUTURE & OUR ENTIRE FUTURE WILL BE DESTROYED IF THESE NON-TRIBAL REMAIN.

INFACT, WE HAD APPEALED SEVERAL TIMES FOR REMOVAL OF NON-TRIBAL FROM HERE. BUT, ALL IN VAIN. ALL OUR VILLAGES HAVE COMPLETELY BEING WASHED-OUT & HALF OF THE LANDS HAVE OCCUPIED BY THE NON-TRIBAL ILLEGALLY & SINCE THEY HAVE OCCUPIED THEN, WHERE SHALL WE(TRIBALS) SURVIVE? WE ARE WELL AWARE THAT YOU ARE ENORMOUSLY DISTURBED & UNREST BY THE UN-EXPECTEDLY CALAMITY BUT AS THE VOICE OF TRIBAL, YOUR EXCELLENCY, THEIR REMOVAL IS URGENTLY REQUIRED FOR THE SAFE OF THE TRIBALS. WE HAVE CONDUCTED AN EMERGENCY MEETING TODAY(-3-01-2005) AT 10AM AT KAMORTA REGARDING THE SAME.THE MEETING WAS ATTENDED BY THE VARIOUS CHAIRMAN OF THE TRIBAL COUNCIL'S , ALL VILLAGE CAPTAIN'S & ACTIVE YOUTHS WHO SURVIVE & TRIBAL LEADERS HAVE STATED THAT THEY HAVE ALREADY SUBMITTED VARIOUS LETTERS TO YOUR EXCELLENCY & EVEN TO THE DEPUTY COMMISSIONER , NICOBAR WITH THEIR FINAL RESOLUTION TO REMOVE THE NON-TRIBAL WHO ARE STAYING HERE ILLEGALLY WHICH IS ALSO IN VIOLATION OF PAT-1956 BUT SO FAR, THE ADMINISTRATION HAD ONLY ABLE TO REMOVE THE NON-TRIBAL AT TERESSA & HAD AGAIN GIVEN THEM PASS.

SINCE YOU ARE OUR PROTECTOR, WE LOOK UPON YOUR EXCELLENCY TO SAFE GUARD OUR LAND & FUTURE BY TAKING PROMPT ACTION IN REMOVING THESE NON-TRIBALS WHO IS ILLEGALLY STAYING HERE FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT. WE ARE NOT SETTLING DOWN IN THEIR LAND THAN WHY SHOULD THEY SETTLE IN OUR LAND. WILL THEY BE ABLE TO PROVIDE US LAND IN MAINLAND? YOUR EXCELLENCY THAN WHY THIS INJUSTICE WITH US?

WITH GREAT RESPECT AND FAITH ON YOUR EXCELLENCY AND THE ADMINISTRATION UNDER YOUR COMMAND EVEN IN THIS HOUR OF CRISIS, WE HAVE LOSS EVERYTHING, OUR FAMILY, OUR SOURCE OF INCOME COCONUT TREES DUE TO THE TIDAL WAVES, WE AGAIN REPEAT AGAIN APPEAL TO YOUR EXCELLENCY TO PLEASE REMOVE THESE NON-TRIBAL FROM OUR LAND.

AND SHALL REMAIN GRATEFUL AND PRAY,

THANKING YOU,

YOURS FAITHFULLY

JAMES SIMON PAUL
1st Captain
Champin

KOSHI MACKENROE JOHN
Katchal

PORTIFER JOSEPH
Katchal

THOMAS TON
Camorta

AYESHA MAJID
Nancowrie

SIMON
3rd captain
Pilpillow, Camorta

TANVEER
Pilpillow, Camorta

CHARLES
Chota Inaka

ROZINA LAHU
1st Captain
Camorta

F. DAVID ALEXIS
2nd Captain
Village, Camorta

GLADYS HACKEY
3rd Captain
Trinket

TONG KUMAR
Captain
Safed Balu

FRANCIS ALEXIS
Daring Village

CECILIA ALLEN
1st Captain
Munack village

JOHN PAUL
Katchal

PILGRIM ADKINSON
Tapong village

SHATRU
3rd Captain
Champin village

FRASER
Tribal leader (youth)
Kakana

MATHEW JHONNY
Tribal youth leader
Safed Balu

ASLAM MAJID
Tribal youth leader
Champin

Editor's note:
In the original Word file of this letter,in some cases it was difficult to determine which name belonged to what title/island/village. I have done the best I could and apologies to the signatories if they are not all correctly listed above.
George Weber

Birth of Onge child increases Onge population to 97

A&N Administration Press Release

received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

4 Jan 2005

A female child was born to a young Onge couple on 4th January 2005 at Ramkrishna Pur in Little Andaman.

The mother is Inakwangeilakubegi alias Rajani and the father is Enati alias Madan.

The baby was born in the Camp in which the Onges were staying in Ramkrishna Pur after the earthquake and tsunami. The baby had a birth weight of 800 g. On 8 Jan 2005, the Doctor at Ramakrishnapur Pur diagnosed that the mother is having less than the required hemoglobin level. Therefore, he advised airlifting to Port Blair. The mother and father along with the newly born baby were airlifted by a Defence Helicopter and were admitted to the Special Ward of the GB Pant Hospital at Port Blair on 8th January 2005.

The mother has improved in the Hospital and their present condition is described as satisfactory.

With this birth, the population of Onges has increased to 97.

Editor's note: see also significance of this event from the Onge point of view in Vishvajit Pandya's article of 20th February 2005.

Bumps on road to reconstruction

by MANASH GOSH
Published by THE STATESMAN

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

4 Jan 2005

The Andaman and Nicobar administration and planners at Delhi's Yojna Bhavan are at a loss as to how to proceed with reconstruction of the tsunami-devastated islands spread over 700 km in one of the most sensitive areas in the Bay of Bengal.

Reason: The restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court on 7 May 2002, to prevent plunder of natural resources and their ill-effects on the indigenous tribes have, post-tsunami, emerged as a major issue. First, there's the ban on cutting of trees to preserve the archipelago's 86 per cent forest cover.

Second, use of local sand and stone for construction work is banned in the interest of safeguarding and preserving the environment. Third, there's a ban on using certain stretches of the Andaman Trunk Road to protect the Jarwa tribe from outsiders.

Finally, according to the Lok Sabha member, Mr Manoranjan Bhakta, the deepening and enlargement of water reservoirs have been disallowed.

These measures put in place for the benefit of the islands' inhabitants and environment have now become a major issue vis-a-vis reconstruction, given the scale of devastation.

Mr Bhakta says - and some officials are inclined to agree - the cutting of trees has become essential for building safe, wooden houses in earthquake-prone islands. Costs, time and logistical factors have ruled out the possibility of bringing logs by vessels from the mainland. The ban on expanding water bodies is the reason why drinking water is scarce in Port Blair.

Policy planners in Delhi, spoken to by The Statesman, fear that reconstruction will be hampered unless the Supreme Court revises its order. There may even be an exodus to the mainland. Already, many victims, especially those living in the outlying islands, are not particularly keen on returning home as many of them are said to be suffering from a deep sense of "shock and abandonment".

There have also been complaints that despite visits by several worthies, including UPA chairperson Mrs Sonia Gandhi, little relief was provided in the remote islands during the first five days after the disaster. Many of them, now camping in Port Blair, are refusing to go back.

Reading the winds and waves helps the islanders survive ther tsunami

Published by ASSOCIATED PRESS

Received from Sreenath Sreenivasan
ss221@columbia.edu

4 Jan 2005

Two days after a tsunami thrashed the island where his ancestors have lived for tens of thousands of years, a lone tribesman stood naked on the beach and looked up at a hovering coast guard helicopter. He then took out his bow and shot an arrow toward the rescue chopper.

It was a signal the Sentinelese have sent out to the world for millennia: They want to be left alone. Isolated from the rest of the world, the tribesmen needed to learn nature's sights, sounds and smells to survive.

Government officials and anthropologists believe that ancient knowledge of the movement of wind, sea and birds may have saved the five indigenous tribes on the Indian archipelago of Andaman and Nicobar islands from the tsunami that hit the Asian coastline 26 Dec.

"They can smell the wind. They can gauge the depth of the sea with the sound of their oars. They have a sixth sense which we don't possess," said Ashish Roy, a local environmentalist and lawyer who has called on the courts to protect the tribes by preventing their contact with the outside world.

The tribes live the most ancient, nomadic lifestyle known to man, frozen in their Paleolithic past. Many produce fire by rubbing stones, fish and hunt with bow and arrow and live in leaf and straw community huts. And they don't take kindly to intrusions.

Anil Thapliyal, a commander in the Indian coast guard, said he spotted the lone tribesman on the island of Sentinel, a 23-square-mile key, on 28 Dec.

"There was a naked Sentinelese man," Thapliyal told The Associated Press. "He came out and shot an arrow at the helicopter."

According to varying estimates, there are only about 400 to 1,000 members alive today from the Great Andamanese, Onges, Jarawas, Sentinelese and Shompens. Some anthropological DNA studies indicate the generations may have spanned back 70,000 years. They originated in Africa and migrated to India through Indonesia, anthropologists say.

It appears that many tribesman fled the shores well before the waves hit the coast, where they would typically be fishing at this time of year.

After the tsunami, local officials spotted 41 Great Andamanese out of 43 in a 2001 Indian census who had fled the submerged portion of their Strait Island. They also reported seeing 73 Onges out of 98 in the census who fled to highland forests in Dugong Creek on the Little Andaman island, or Hut Bay, a government anthropologist said.

However, the fate of the three other tribes won't be known until officials complete a survey of the remote islands this week, he said. The government reconnaissance mission will also assess how the ecosystem, most crucially, the water sources has been damaged.

Taking surveys of these people is dangerous work.

The more than 500 islands across a 3,200-square mile chain in the southern reaches of the Bay of Bengal appear at first glance to be a tropical paradise. But even one of the earliest visitors, Marco Polo, called the atols "the land of the head hunters." Roman geographer Claudius Ptolemaeus called the Andamans the "islands of the cannibals."

The Sentinelese are fiercely protective of their coral reef-ringed terrain. They used to shoot arrows at government officials when they came ashore and offered gifts of coconuts, fruit and machetes on the beach.

The Jarawas had armed clashes with authorities until the 1990s, killing several police officers.

Samir Acharya, head of the independent Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, said the Jarawas were peaceful until the British, and later the Indians, began encroaching on their territory. Hundreds of bow-wielding Jarawas were killed by British bullets in 1859.

Over the past few years, however, relations have improved and some friendly contacts have been made. The government has banned interaction with the tribes, and even taking their pictures is an offense. Many tribe members have visited Port Blair, capital of the Indian-administered territory, and a few Great Andamanese and Onges work in government offices.

Outsiders are forbidden from interacting with the tribesmen because such contact has led in the past to alcoholism and disease among the islanders, and sexual abuse of local women.

"They have often been sexually exploited by influential people. They give the tribal women sugar, a gift wrapped in a colored cloth that makes them happy, and that's it," said Roy.

One of the most celebrated stories of a tribal man straddling both worlds is that of En-Mai, a Jarawa teenager brought to Port Blair in 1996 after he broke his leg. Six months later, he looked like any urban kid, in a T-shirt, denim jeans and a reversed baseball cap. But he is back on his island now, having shunned Western ways.

"He took to the ways of the certain, out of a certain novelty," said Acharya. "It's like eating Chinese food on a weekend."

Port Blair bureaucrats can't communicate and can't decide

by ABRAHAM GEORGE
amgeorge0225@yahoo.co.in

3 Jan 2005

We need answers to the following immediately (not in 5 days, as the previous official response on access):

1. Has the military reached all 36 inhabited islands of Andamans and Nicobar? If so, what is the status of the survivors?

2. There were over 375,000 people living in the 36 islands (close to 100,000 in Port Blair). How many are remaining? Has anyone taken a count (including the few hundred officials and others who were flown out in the past 3 days)?

3. How are food and water in large quantities being transported to all 36 islands? How much has been airdropped (regardless of whether or not the survivors are drinking coconut water, as claimed)?

4. When will the government permit foreign rescue groups (governmental and private NGOs) who have the capability and resources to assist be permitted into all 36 islands?

Time is running out. The people must insist on the government to act quickly.

Urgent Call for Assistance

For the past 5 days, I have been emailing anyone and everyone I know in India saying that relief groups must go into the Andamans and Nicobar Islands immediately. I have been to those islands some 4 years back, and I know that the people there have no place to escape from the water. So far, the government has not permitted anyone other than the military and a few local relief groups into these islands.

In fact, the first thing that the government announced after the tsunami was that it doesn't need any foreign assistance. It is playing to the Indian public's anti-American sentiment and the false pride from the recent economic gains. How can the world force the government to save these people?

Here below is my most recent email to India. Can you please pass this on to the news group at your organization? Something must be done right away. Otherwise, there is a catastrophe in the making among the people who are remaining. There is no source of drinking water in any of those islands; the wells are damaged and there is no power outside the government building in Port Blair. Please do something to get someone to investigate and force the government to let help get in. Time is running out.

THE INDIAN GOVERNMENT SAYS IT IS STILL CONSIDERING.
HOW MANY MORE SURVIVORS OF TSUNAMI HAVE TO DIE BEFORE INDIA LETS FOREIGN RESCUE GROUPS ENTER THE ISLANDS?

Of the 570 islands, 36 are inhabited by some 370,000 people. Only 100,000 or so live in Port Blair, the only city that has any reasonable infrastructure. I won't be surprised if we find out later that half the population in these islands -- 150,000 people -- died as a result of Tsunami. We won't know that until someone goes in there.

There are some 50,000 indigenous people living in the interior forests. The government says that they are safe. During normal times, it is difficult to find or see them. How does the government know that they are safe?

The Indian government is yet to permit access by any outside rescue groups. I am afraid time is almost run out. If truth ever comes out, don't be surprised to find out later that more people died here than in Indonesia.

For the masses, truth is often lie repeated. All governments know that best, especially where there is no real investigative press.

India not totally opposed to aid through NGOs after all

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

3 Jan 2005

After yesterday's rather dissappointing news about the admin position on NGOs involvement, there is better news that came in today. Earlier in the day I had spoken to Samir Acharya after he had some meetings with senior officials in the administration.

It does appear that they are not as negative as it had come across to be. It seems that they will no problems with NGO involvement in the Andamans anyway, but for wanting to work in the Nicobars they want some concrete details and ideas of what is being proposed, before they will take a decision of what and who will be permitted to work.

Its clear that this is a situation that is constantly changing but lets keep hoping that it will improve.

Mud volcano on North Sentinel island

by DIAMOND DAVE
Diamonddavej@Hotmail.com

3 Jan 2005

There are reports of mud volcanoes erupting on the Andamans. One ofthe mud volcanoes is on North Sentinel Island! This is bad news.

I'm a geologist, I downloaded topography for all of the Andamans. I'm trying to find the altitude of the islands to work out the survivability. The topography was measured by the Space Shuttle in 1999, its SRTM data. I guess that mud is erupting from a fault line I seen in SRTM data that trends SSE to NNW on North Sentinel. I'm not sure of the altitude of the island, SRTM is measured at tree the level.

The coast of North Sentinel Island seems to be 30-40 metres a.s.l. the interior is 60 to 80 metres a.s.l. but this could be due to the tree effect. Car Nicobar is the same altitude, 30 to 40 metres at the coast and 60 to 80 metres inland, but I heard that its highest point is in fact just 16 metres. The situation appears poor for North Sentinel Island.

The Andamans are part of an accretionary wedge, this occurs where two plates collide. Here wet sediment is squeezed, much like a sponge the water contained in the sediment is forced to the surface along faults. The fact that mud is erupting in a number of sites along faults indicates that the Indian-Australian plate moved west or NW at the Andamans, and squeezed the wet sedimentary wedge and water contained is now erupting to the surface. This in accordance with tsunami simulations by NOAA. The fault on North Sentinel Island is offset to the left, sinistral, this is in accordance with the expected plate movement.

Also the channels that cut the Islands were likely caused by past major tsunamis events, waves washed over the islands splitting them in two. There are reports that islands have been split in two by the latest tsunami. The fact that there were very few channels cutting the islands in the first place indicates that the phenomena of major island splitting tsunamis is very rare, perhaps once per 10,000 years or more. It could explain the language groups, that Great Andaman Island was once contiguous and populated by one group that was later split up by a major tsunami calamity.

First Open letter to the President of India

signed by
Mahasweta Devi. writer
Rupa Ganguly, actress
Dr. Sita Venkateswar, author of "Development and Ethnocide: Colonial Practices in the Andaman Islands"
Dr. Madhusree Mukerjee, author of "The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders"

3 Jan 2005

Half the population of the Nicobar Islands is swept away, and many smaller islands and shores remain inaccessible to this day. Bodies are yet to be disposed of. Thousands of people are living in daily contact with decomposing bodies, with little food, water or fuel, or access to news of their loved ones. Relief materials are piling up in Port Blair and at Chennai and Kolkata, but utter confusion prevails in their distribution. Ships cannot dock on any of the Nicobar Islands, so that dinghys are being used to approach the islands through rough waters, leading to woefully inadequate aid.

Even on Little Andaman, a few hours from Port Blair, where 25,000 people are living on very limited amounts of water, food and fuel, no relief materials reached for at least five days. The armed forces are doing their best, but they are not equipped to deal with a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude. A dire need prevails for doctors, experts in body disposal, water desalination, and other emergency relief providers. Injured, hungry, cold and thirsty people stranded on the Nicobars are no doubt dying by the hour. Crocodiles are feeding on corpses in Little Andaman and attacking the living. Added to this is the fact that a cholera epidemic hit the Nicobars in 2002; the bacillus exists on the islands, and for all we know is already taking hold.

Ships from Chennai or Kolkata typically take five days to reach Port Blair. Once there, materials need to be sorted and channeled onto ships and aircraft for ferrying to the Nicobar Islands. A command center has been set up, but will take days or weeks to overcome the bottleneck caused by overwhelming need and bureaucratic apathy, if it ever does. The aftermath of other disasters such as Bhopal generates little confidence that the administrators have the organizational and logistical capacity to discharge the enormous burdens they have assumed.

Mainland volunteers eager to help with expertise and materials are not being permitted to provide relief at the Nicobar Islands. They must be immediately allowed into Port Blair and also given the means to get to affected areas. We also urge you to reconsider the decision of Indian authorities not to allow foreign aid. International aid agencies are already ministering to survivors in Sumatra and Thailand, and even in Aceh the situation is coming under control. A US desalination ship is providing clean water in the Maldives; such a ship could be saving lives in the Nicobars. Materials and experts are daily flying from Thailand onto a US aircraft carrier off Sumatra for the relief effort onshore. From Thailand it would have taken-would take-no more than a few hours for international aid agencies, which are experienced in dealing with disasters, to airdrop supplies such as drinking water onto the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and to send medical help and experts for cleaning up the isla

nds and making them habitable again.

India presumably does not want foreigners in this region because of defence concerns. But what is the point of defence if not to protect citizens? What security concern can possibly outweigh the need to save the lives of thousands?

In 1942, when a massive cyclone hit southern Bengal, killing more than 10,000, the British authorities did not send aid for weeks, and also prevented private agencies from functioning there. Their concern was security. Later, during the Bengal famine, they refused offers of grain from other countries, saying they had the situation under control; in truth, more than 2 million people died.

Today we are appalled at such callousness. Why should Indians in turn be handed the burden of similar guilt? The Nicobar catastrophe has the potential to double in magnitude. The government of India does not have the resources to deal with this crisis, and needs to put aside its pride and accept help if thousands of more lives are not to be lost.

Desperate situation in the Nicobar islands

Published by GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

3 Jan 2005

A desperate group of starving survivors in one of the tsunami-hit Nicobar islands kidnapped the island's top civilian official and its police chief in protest at the inadequate relief operation, it emerged yesterday.

The survivors from Great Nicobar Island spent four days without food before trekking through the jungle to the wrecked headquarters settlement at Campbell Bay.

When they arrived they discovered the island's assistant commissioner and deputy assistant of police eating a plate of biryani, witnesses said.

The crowd of Punjabi settlers took the men hostage, demanding that they provide help to the hundreds of islanders who were starving in the jungle.

``The assistant commissioner was eating biryani in his guesthouse,'' one witness, Lilly Ommen, said. ``The men arrived and pointed out that they were starving. They also said there were people stuck in the forest with nothing, as well as many dead bodies.''

Mrs Ommen, who is now in a church-run refugee camp in the island's capital, Port Blair, said the group had survived after finding a sack of rice floating in the sea. They had made their way to Campbell Bay with a group of survivors by jumping over crocodile-infested canals.

``I'm very angry,'' Suresh, 22, a welder from Great Nicobar Island, added.

``We saw these people eating biryani. But we had nothing but rice soaked in salt water.''

The assistant commissioner was released after promising to provide more food.

The kidnapping came amid mounting criticism of the Indian relief operation in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, where as many as 20,000 people have died.

According to aid agencies very little aid has reached the people who need it, with some island communities still waiting for help. Delhi has so far refused all offers of foreign assistance to the islands.

A group of aid workers from Oxfam who managed to reach Little Andaman Island yesterday described conditions there as appalling. They also said the local administration in Port Blair had made it virtually impossible for them to join the relief effort.

``The conditions are terrible. People are living in the open. They don't have a roof,'' Shaheen Nilofer, Oxfam's east India programme manager, said.

``There are acute problems with water and sanitation. People have the right to receive humanitarian assistance. Who are they [the local administration] to decide we will take assistance from there and not from there? More people are going to die.''

The Indian government says its rescue operation across the 435-mile-long archipelago has been hampered by the islands' remoteness, and by the fact that pontoons and jetties have been washed away. On Great Nicobar, the tsunami and subsequent landslides have destroyed the island's only road.

``All the small boats have been destroyed. We urgently need boats with metal bottoms,'' Hoslo Jiwa, an aid worker, said, after touring Car Nicobar, the island worst affected by the disaster, on Saturday.

``You really need teams to hack their way through the jungle or use these small boats. On the really remote islands, God knows what is happening. They have only made aerial surveys and dropped packages.''

The local administration in Port Blair puts the death toll across the 572-island archipelago at more than 3,000. But aid agencies say that figure is based on out-of-date voters' lists, and fails to take into account the thousands of illegal migrants living on the islands who are now missing.

They say that on Car Nicobar Island alone, which was 80% destroyed, as many as 20,000 may have perished. From an unofficial population of 35,000, only 15,000 are still alive.

Demand for new access policy

by ABRAHAM GEORGE
amgeorge0225@yahoo.co.in

2 Jan 2005

Why does it take the authorities 5 days to decide whether to let NGOs enter the islands? It should have been decided 5 days ago. What is that they want to hide? Governments always use national security/interest as a good explanation, but we have to insist on transparency and full disclosure in a crisis like this. There is grave doubt on whether the government rescue teams have so far gone much beyond Port Blair and few other islands that are easier to access. To say that the people are drinking coconut water, and hence, safe, is no satisfactory explanation.

The world must insist that the the government permits other rescue teams (Indian and foreign) to go into all the 36 inhabitted islands, and deliver food and water without any more delay. Everyone is being put through buerocratic hurdles at a time when maximum assistance should be sought to rescue those who are still surviving.

Indian Ocean island pleads for attention, relief

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

2 Jan 2005

Half a dozen aftershocks jolted India's remote Anadman and Nicobar islands on Sunday as military planes and government cargo ships tried to reach thousands of stranded families desperate for humanitarian aid.

India's Meteorology Department recorded three aftershocks on Saturday night and another three early Sunday with 5 to 5.9 magnitudes. Rescue efforts have been hampered as nearly all the jetties in the archipelago in the Bay of Bengal were demolished by the giant waves that rocked the region a week earlier, leaving thousands of hungry and injured people homeless. ``This is the biggest relief effort in the history of India,'' Prakash Jaiswal, junior Home Minister, said in Port Blair on Sunday before taking journalists on a relief sortie to the southern Car Nicobar island. ``We are reaching everywhere with aid. I still have hopes that there will be survivors among the missing people.''

Bambooflat island is only a 20 minute ferry ride from Port Blair, capital of the Indian territory of more than 500 islands, yet no relief for the tsunami victims had arrived as of Saturday, leaving some 2,000 families angry and desperate for food and shelter.

``You're the first man to come here and ask us how we are,'' Abdul Hamza told India's Opposition Leader, Jaswant Singh, as he walked the narrow alleys flanked by rice paddies still flooded six days after the tsunamis swept over the islands.

``We are right next to Port Blair and still no official bothered to care for us,'' said Hamza, 50, a Muslim rice farmer wearing a traditional skullcap and long white tunic. ``I am touched by your concern. It brings tears to my eyes.''

Singh, a Foreign Minister in the Hindu-nationalist Government that was ousted by the Congress party last year, replied: ``Please keep your courage and your trust. I don't have the power of Government anymore, but I will do the best I can.''

Sonia Gandhi, head of India's ruling Congress party, visited Car Nicobar last Monday.

The Home Ministry in New Delhi said late on Saturday that some 74 million tonnes of food, 41 million tonnes of drinking water and 44 million tonnes of medicines had been airlifted to the islands.

India's official death toll in the disaster stood at 9,067. According to government figures, 812 bodies had been buried or cremated in the Andaman and Nicobar islands as of Saturday. Of the 5,511 people still missing in India, 5,421 were from the islands.

Indian authorities typically bar foreigners from the more isolated islands, partly for security reasons because of an Indian Air Force base in Car Nicobar and to protect a dwindling group of indigenous people. Even Indians need special permits to travel there.

Some 40 percent of the densely forested area is designated as a tribal reserve where indigenous people live; the remaining area is protected for wood cultivation.

A few international relief agencies have begun working in Port Blair, where permission is not needed, but they are unable to go deeper into the archipelago.

The missing could not be presumed dead because they could have survived in coconut groves that dot the islands, said V.V. Bhat, Chief Secretary of the islands. Drinking water shortages have been reported, but residents were making do by drinking coconut water, officials said.

Representatives of four Indian volunteer groups have been struggling to deliver tonnes of rations, clothes, bed sheets and oil, hampered by the lack of transportation.

Paris-based Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) and international humanitarian group Oxfam, have been asking to go in with the Indian military but the Government has yet to grant approval.

Onge saved

Published by IGNATIUS PRABHAKAR
iprabhakar@yahoo.com

Received from MADHUSREE MUKHERJEE
lopchu@att.net

1 Jan 2005

It seems all the 73 Onge from Dugong Creek were evacuated to Hut Bay. They knew it was coming and headed for the hills. And a newspaper report today says the Sentinelese shot arrows at a helicopter that hovered over to check on them. Wonderful! (Editor's query: how, when, by what means and by whom did the lucky Onge get forewarned?)

Far more grim is the news from the Nicobars. All 12 villages on Car Nicobar were washed away.

25,000 Bengali settlers on Little Andaman remain without food, cooking fuel and power. Apparently there is some water. 2000 families need food and shelter. The godown was by the jetty at Hut Bay and got washed away. Aid is supposed to reach only today!

in reply to the message above:

Editor's note:

Apparently the Onge have a folk memory of what to do when first signs of an approaching Tsunami are noted: a rapid and extensive withdrawal of the sea (a sort of super-ebb) before the arrival of the big wave. They made for the nearest hill in a hurry. That the other tribes have by all accounts come through comparatively unscathed seems to indicate that they all had this know-how.

The tribal people knew this, the Indian settlers and their administration did not. Food for thought.

See also Vishvajit Panbdya's article of 20th February 2005 on the subject.

Aid requirements

Received from NATURE PARKS
Dr. Linda Olsvig-Whittaker" <
Linda.Whittaker@nature-parks.org.il
Tel: 91 98734 68828 Sharbendu

1 Jan 2005

Q1. What is most needed?

Avoid food.
Water purification tablets? - Yes!- IMMEDIATE - huge quantities, as much as possible please.

Mineral water pouches- Yes! - IMMEDIATE - best since the water won't be in contact with other possible modes of contamination.

Energy biscuits, high protien dry snack - Earliest, if not immediate.

Clothes, earliest, but can wait a few days.

Slippers- needed, but can wait.

The govt and bigger organizations can handle the bigger things later Let's take care of basics like filling the gaps in Palestine.

Q2. If we can airlift to Delhi, can you get a courier to carry supplies to the islands? We want to make sure the supplies reach the people who need it.

If you can rush it to Delhi, We CAN! and we WILL! I and my other mates from Delhi can collect and depatch it to Port Blair immediately. We already have had a word with airlines on this. They have agreed to fly relief materials for free. Thanks to them.

Q3. Who would be the receiving end in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, for distribution?

Very important question.

Andaman islands being a very small place, local NGOs too are few. I am strictly against channeling everything through one body or NGO. Each organization or individual has limitations in terms of reach. They can't be in all places, all time. This can hinder immediate disposal and also make processes cumbersome & tough for the individual too. The re-building of the islands is a long process and as we move forward, we have to keep building strong, self-sufficient soldiers rather than vesting all power into few hands. The local & ordinary people are the best. Even distribution. When responsibility is bestow even into weak shoulders, they make themselves strong.

So, here's my plan (proposed):

i) pick up trusted sincere locals (Mr. X) whom we've known over years. Now there are different relief camps operational all over in Port Blair with each camp sheltering about 500 (+ -);

ii) entrust them with the responsibility of evenly despatching the relief materials in their individual camp.

iii) prepare guidelines of depatching to ensure even distribution & give copies of these guidelines to all Mr. X's to strictly follow.

No one knows this better than the devastated Nicobarese. All their lives they have lived by even distribution and Captain, Vice Captain, Chief, Tuhet Captain concept.

Example: I along with others shall quickly formulate a distribution pattern and give these entrusted people in each camp these specific printed guidelines.

Better someone who understands diet requirements, nutrition expert etc prepare this. Please come forward. Someone talk to WHO!

Guidelines like - water? Assess necessity of required water intake per individual/per family. Now this person shall say give four pouches of mineral water to each individual in a day. So this individual has water with him (safe from contamination, thereby reasonably safe from epidemics) & knows that he can't get more than the regulated quota. So, he uses it judiciously.

Water purifiers -- give water purifiers tablets or bottles on an apportioned basis.

In such moments of adversity, there can't be anyone better than the local people. Distribution through various channels is extremely important for even, judicious and fast delivery which is in immense need.

I hope this ranked list and suggestions helps. There might be gaps and errors in the plans and I humbly request guidance from experienced individuals & groups.

Reluctance to admit need for help

by ABRAHAM GEORGE
amgeorge0225@yahoo.co.in

1 Jan 2005

Today, the Indian government has put out its report on Nicobar Islands. The military general in charge of Southern Command says that the destruction of Car Nicobar Islands is "total." What does that mean? How many dead, how many surviving? There were 375,000 people in the 36 inhabited islands of Andamans and Nicobar before Tsunami. How many are left? What is happening to them?

To-date, the government has not permitted any foreign assistance. India does NOT have the technical resources and logistical capability to save the remaining population. 6 days have passed. These people are probably dying of hunger and thirst. Millions of gallons of drinking water and tons of food supplies must be airdropped into these islands. It is not possible to access them by land or water with large quantities of material. If something is not done quickly, there will be more deaths in these islands than all other places put together.

The world community must demand the Indian government to bring in external assistance. Massive airdrop of water and supplies must begin immediately. Medical personnel with supplies and medicine must also land in all these islands - not just Port Blair alone. Arial survey will not do.

The world must not sit and watch this human tragedy to unfold. We cannot permit arrogance and false pride to take precedence over the needs of these desperate people. Please help by contacting anyone with influence to persuade the government to let assistance in without any further delay.

Establishing communications links again

Received from KALPAVRIKSH
Mr. Pankaj Sekhsaria
Apt. 5, Sri Dutta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana,
Pune 411004
Tel: 020 - 25654239 / 25675450
Fax: 25654239
E-mail: pankaj@leadindia.org

1 Jan 2005

The Minister of Communications & Information Technology, Shri Dayanidhi Maran, reviewed the progress made in restoring of communication facilities in Andaman & Nicobar Islands, here today at a high level meeting. The Minister of State for Communications & Information Technology, Dr. Shakeel Ahmad, who reached Port Blair yesterday afternoon to over see the relief and restoration work, visited the affected areas and directed the officials to make all out efforts to restore the telephone exchanges and satellite communications in the Tsunami affected areas of the Island.

Meanwhile, Satellite Telephones have been commissioned at Campbell Bay and Car Nicobar with the installation of INMARSAT terminals by the team of engineers deputed by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL). The Satellite phones are now available to public for making calls. In addition to this a new telephone exchange of 256 lines (CDOT 256 Port) at Campbell Bay has been commissioned and is working with the telephone network of Andaman & Nicobar. One MCPC (Multiple Channel Per Carrier) equipment shipped to Car Nicobar yesterday is under installation. One VSAT has been airlifted today to Car Nicobar Island with engineers.

Three teams with 7 INMARSAT terminals have already left for Kamrota, Katchal, Terassa and Champin islands. Another separate team with INMARSAT terminals has left for Hutbay Island. They will commission additional satellite phone services by tomorrow. Efforts are on to provide PCOs in Bambooflat using Port Blair WLL systems' coverage. It may be recalled that Bambooflat telephone exchange was completely washed out by the tidal waves.

In order to reduce congestion at Port Blair exchange, more than 200 additional circuits have been commissioned from Port Blair to Chennai and Kolkata. Four numbers of power plants (25A), six engine alternators and 10 battery sets are being air-lifted to Port Blair in addition to 8 numbers of power plants (25A) already sent to Port Blair yesterday. Seven numbers of CDOT 256 port switches, two numbers of power plants and five numbers of INMARSAT terminals have been airlifted to Port Blair. In addition, three more 256 port exchanges with MDF (Main Distribution Frame) and 14 numbers of optimux (optical fibre equipment) are being airlifted to Port Blair for installation in the affected areas.

The entire operation of restoration of communication facilities in Andaman & Nicobar Islands is being supervised by a team of two senior officers of Department of Telecom, specially sent from Delhi.

India bars aid agencies from joining relief effort

Received from WILHELM KLEIN
wilhelmklein@web.de

1 Jan 2005

Indian authorities are refusing to allow foreign aid agencies to join relief efforts in the devastated islands of Andaman and Nicobar.

But the islands' administration says that while relief material is welcome, they are able to handle the distribution and must be left to do it.

Foreign aid agencies say they have been denied permission so far to join the relief effort in the Andamans.

They say the local administration has told them to bring in relief material but said they, along with the Indian defence forces, will distribute it.

People all over the archipelago are angry at not receiving adequate relief, particularly drinking water.

But the island's administration insists relief distribution has to be left to them and the defence forces stationed there.

Foreigners are barred from visiting the outlying islands of the archipelago and Indians also require special permits to go to the islands, which are home to some of the world's most primitive tribes.

Aid sent to the islands

Received from REEFWATCH MARINE CONSERVATION
Mr. Mitali Dutt Kakar
Priyanka Building, Ground Floor
50, St. Paul's Road
Bandra (W)
Mumbai 400 050
Tel: 91 22 26518206 / 26518223;
Fax: 91 22 26518209
E-mail: reefwatchindia@reefwatchindia.org

1 Jan 2005

In the wake of the disastrous 'Tsunami' that hit the Andaman islands and claimed lives, homes, property and means of livelihood of many, Reefwatch Marine Conservation is now arranging to facilitate relief measures to badly hit segments of the populace at Andamans.

In the course of our research & other activities on marine conservation in the Andamans, we have been working closely with the forest rangers, the fishing community, the coast guard, environmental agencies and the local people. Our personnel know, first-hand, the pulse of the situation in the islands. We are therefore undertaking the responsibility of seeing that the needy get timely aid.

We are receiving & consolidating all contributions at our Mumbai Office (clothing, blankets, equipment / gear for transit camps, medicine, provisions, water sanitizers and any other utility items) for onward despatch to the Andamans. Jet Airways is providing us the logistics support free of charge. We are expediting the whole process as timely material aid is essential to restoring the morale of a whole people. Our personnel at the Andamans are arranging to deliver these life-saving aid-packages to the needy.

We are also arranging to collect all monetary aid as a dedicated relief-funding package. This package shall be presented directly to the Governor for disbursement. All cheques / DDs may be drawn in favour of REEFWATCH MARINE CONSERVATION.

We would really value your assistance in our efforts.

Starvation feared in Indian archipelago

Received from WILHELM KLEIN
wilhelmklein@web.de

1 Jan 2005

Fighting to survive without water or food since the tsunami, villagers on a remote southern Indian archipelago forbidden to outsiders are starving and desperate for humanitarian aid, survivors and officials said yesterday. India has so far denied international aid groups access to enter most of the island territory of Andaman and Nicobar, the last tsunami blind spot where casualties are not known, but feared to number in the thousands.

"There is nothing to eat there. There is no water. In a couple of days, people will start dying of hunger," said Anup Ghatak, a utilities contractor from Campbell Bay island, as he was being evacuated to Port Blair, the capital of the territory.

Yesterday, an island official said 712 bodies had been buried or cremated, and at least 3,754 people were missing amid the debris of crumbled homes, downed trees and mounds of dead animals on several islands.

That lowered a government estimate Thursday of 10,000 missing in the hundreds of islands scattered over 7,000 kilometres in the Bay of Bengal.

Homeless and stunned victims of Sunday's disaster poured into eight relief camps in Port Blair yesterday with harrowing tales of death and destruction. Walking long distances through dense forests to get to the nearest airfield, they were grateful they had survived, but anxious to learn if friends and families were safe.

"There is starvation. People haven't had food or water for at least five days. There are carcasses. There will be an epidemic," Manoranjan Bhakta, Andaman's representative to the federal parliament, said after being surrounded at roadside by people demanding food and water for stranded relatives.

Indian authorities have traditionally barred foreigners from most of the islands -- partly for security reasons, because of the Indian air force base in Car Nicobar, and also to protect a dwindling group of indigenous people.

Even Indians need special permits to travel there.

About 40 per cent of the densely forested area is designated as a tribal reserve where indigenous people live. The remainder is protected for wood cultivation.

A few international relief agencies have begun working in Port Blair -- the territory's capital, where permission is not needed to enter -- but are unable to go deeper into the archipelago's 500 islands.

India has officially reported more than 7,700 dead throughout the country in the earthquake-tsunami disaster. But that does not include a complete count in the island territories.

The missing could not be presumed dead because they could have survived in coconut groves that dot the islands, said V.V. Bhat, chief secretary of the islands.

Car Nicobar's famous church flattened

Received from WILHELM KLEIN
wilhelmklein@web.de

1 Jan 2005

The famous John Richardson church in Car Nicobar in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands has been completely destroyed by the giant tsunami that also killed thousands in the pristine archipelago.

"Nothing remains of the church," moaned pastor Silvanus, who has just been rescued by navy from Car Nicobar, part of the archipelago which has 572 islands, islets and rocks in the Bay of Bengal.

Officially named the St. Thomas Cathedral Church, it was established in the 1930s during British colonial rule and was one of the oldest and most distinguished churches in the region.

The name John Richardson comes from late local hero and missionary Bishop John Richardson who spread Christianity across the Andamans, was a legendary do-gooder and was even nominated to parliament by India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

He died in 1978 and this year a special statue dedicated to him and a stadium named after him were to open in Car Nicobar. But everything was washed away by the tsunami.

Even the guesthouses, which were to keep Andaman and Nicobar Lieutenant Governor Ram Kapse when he would arrive to inaugurate the statue and the stadium, were completely destroyed.

"I am more sad about the destruction of the church than even my injuries," said Anil Mistry, part of the parish of the St. Thomas Church and now a tsunami survivor in a hospital here.

He has fractured both his kneecaps and is suffering from food poisoning. "The church meant everything to me and to so many people from Nicobar. John Richardson was like a saviour here - there are so many he helped, so many lives he had touched.

"To think that anything built in his memory should suffer like this is tragic, really tragic."

Added H. Samuel, another survivor: "He was the messiah with the gospel around here. It is because of John Richardson that so many people were able to learn to write and speak in English.

"He literally showed us the light and now everything that we wanted to do for his memory has been cast into darkness. The moment I get healed, I'll try to do my best to recreate a church in his name."

200 bodies wash up on Port Blair beach

Received from WILHELM KLEIN
wilhelmklein@web.de

1 Jan 2005

About 200 bodies were found today on a beach in India's tsunami-ravaged Andamans and Nicobar archipelago, a police official said, raising the official death toll in the island chain to 912.

"It could be more," Andamans police chief Samsher Deol told a media conference late today, referring to the numbers of bodies found on Car Nicobar island.

Relief workers said it appeared the bodies had been washed up on the beach of Car Nicobar, which bore some of the brunt of Sunday's giant waves that killed at least 125,000 people across Asia.

Andamans chief secretary V. V. Bhatt, the archipelago's senior bureaucrat, said another 712 bodies discovered after the tsunami had now been either cremated or buried.

A total of 3754 people were still listed as missing while 7,853 people had been evacuated from devastated areas, he said.

Survivors face crocodiles

by KYLIE HANSEN

Received from WILHELM KLEIN
wilhelmklein@web.de

1 Jan 2005

Tsunami victims on India's remote islands have told how they battled two days of hunger and savage crocodiles in their bid to survive.

The first reports from survivors on the Andaman and Nicobar islands reveal a shocking picture of entire villages flattened by walls of water.

Those who made it out faced days of thirst, hunger and endless walking.

One group of refugees who made it to an anchored rescue ship were then threatened by a group of crocodiles that had been swept ashore by the huge waves.

"As we were returning, two or three crocodiles started coming toward us," Sister Charity, a 32-year-old nun, said.

Mohammad Yusef, a 60-year-old fisherman from Tea Top village on Car Nicobar island, said: "There's not a single hut which is standing.

"Everything is gone. Most of the people (on Car Nicobar) have gone up to the hills and are afraid to come down," he said.

Most survivors have been taken to Port Blair, the region's capital, where makeshift camps have been set up.

The International Red Cross said 30,000 people might still be missing on the island chains, which are more than 1100km southeast of India's mainland and have a population of 350,000. So far authorities have only recovered a small number of bodies.

The islands' administrator, Lt-Gov Ram Kapse, said about 400 bodies had been cremated or buried and 3000 were missing.

Helicopters operating from 10 ships have been flying over the islands, looking for signs of life. With most jetties and port facilities gone, authorities are using rubber boats to land on beaches.

On the southern coast of India's mainland, UNICEF has begun moving more than 2175 water storage tanks into relief camps as aid is stepped up.

In a bid to avert the threat of disease, workers in the south have sprayed the streets to ward off cholera.

Meanwhile, Indian authorities have defended issuing new tsunami warnings on Thursday, which caused mass panic along the country's coastline and on outlying islands.

It is in sharp contrast to Sunday's devastating tsunami, when the Indian Government was criticised for failing to quickly pass on warnings.

The latest round of false tsunami warnings sent thousands on Andaman and Nicobar islands into new waves of panic and terror.

Relief efforts were put on hold and rescue boats headed back out to deeper water as fears grew of more killer waves.

In Port Blair, more than 30,000 people scampered to safe shelters.

Andamans missing "presumed dead"

Received from WILHELM KLEIN
wilhelmklein@web.de

1 Jan 2005

People evacuated from the Andamans arrive in Madras (Photo: Senthil Kumar)

The police chief in the Andaman islands says most of the thousands of people missing there after Sunday's tsunami are probably dead.

Several hundred bodies have been recovered from the hundreds of islands that make up archipelago.

The authorities say many more could be lying washed up in island forests.

More than 3,000 people have been evacuated. Many were taken to the Indian mainland. Others are in the Andamans' capital, Port Blair.

Not encouraging'

India's secretary for border management, AK Rastogi, said in Delhi on Friday that the number of missing had been scaled down from 5,900 but still stood at 3,000.

Police Inspector-General Shamsher Bahadur Deol told the BBC that some of these people may still be in island jungles. He said others were still turning up but in smaller and smaller numbers. "The signs are not encouraging at all," he said. Mr Deol said it may never be known accurately how many people perished. Only 712 are confirmed dead.

The authorities say the low body count could be because many bodies are lying in the forests that are hard to get to because of stagnant waters and sludge.

They also say that tsunamis usually pull bodies down into the bottom of the ocean.

The head of rescue operations says evacuations are now being scaled down.

The heaviest destruction is in the Nicobar islands, the southern part of the archipelago.

"The major part of the evacuation has been completed [there]," Lieutenant General BS Thakur told the AFP news agency.

'Jetties destroyed'

Although rescuers say they have reached all of the hundreds of islands in the chain, access remains a problem.

"There is a problem of jetties which have been destroyed and the roads... washed away so we are using smaller boats and using local canoes for emergency supplies and evacuation," Lt Gen Thakur said.

Mr Rastogi in Delhi also gave updated information on the fate of a number of aboriginal tribes on the islands.

Most of the Andamanese, Onges, Jarawas and Sentinelese were safe, he said, but the 3,000 missing come from the 28,000-strong Nicobarese.

The greatest fears are for the 400-strong Shompens in Great Nicobar. The search for them is still on.

There has still been no news of four international scientists and 16 staff stationed at Indira Point, south of Great Nicobar and about 140km from Indonesia.

It is the southernmost point in India and is named after former premier Indira Gandhi.

On Thursday the coastguard said the crew of a helicopter flew over it and said it was submerged.

Islands' death toll could reach 15,000

by LUKE HARDING

Received from WILHELM KLEIN
wilhelmklein@web.de

1 Jan 2005

The death toll from the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean could rise as high as 15,000, aid agencies have warned.

As survivors described how they lived on potatoes while waiting for rescue in the jungle, about

10,000 people, about half the population of Car Nicobar, the worst affected island, were still missing.

On other islands, such as Little Andaman, witnesses reported that crocodiles had started eating bodies floating in the water.

"I would say that the death toll is around 15,000 from the islands of the south. This is based on a collection of reports from doctors," said Hoslo Jiwa, of the Greenlife Society, a charity that works with the islands' wildlife and tribal populations.

The relief effort in the archipelago north-west of Sumatra, made up of 572 islands, 36 of them inhabited, has been hampered by their remoteness.

Speaking in the capital, Port Blair, the islands' lieutenant governor, Ram Kapse, said the official death toll stood at more than 3000 - but he was hopeful that some survivors were still in the jungle.

But six days after the disaster it seems increasingly likely that most of the 10,000 people missing from Car Nicobar are dead.

Michael Paul, a police constable on Chaura island, said he and others had survived by eating jungle potatoes. Speaking from hospital in Port Blair, he said it took rescuers two days to arrive. "The wave knocked me over and a wall fell on top of me."

About 500 people had now been taken off the island but another 900 had not been accounted for, he said.

Another patient at the hospital said he had clung to a palm tree in the sea. "I spent the evening in the water," Hilary, 14, from Car Nicobar said. "My mother and brother were both drowned."

Indian naval officials said that the archipelago's aboriginal populations had survived.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are home to five primitive tribal groups of Mongoloid and African origins, including the Sentinelese, a prehistoric tribe of hunter-gatherers who fiercely resist all contact with the outside world.

Vice Commodore Arun Singh said the tribe appeared to have survived. An Indian naval helicopter spotted them on the beach of North Sentinel Island, he said. The helicopter had not landed, he added. "You can't approach Sentinel Island. I tried it in 1978. They fired arrows at me."

The other tribes including the Onges, Great Andamanese, Jarwas and Shompens were all still there, he said.

In other parts of the archipelago the news was worse. There has been no trace of four scientists studying giant leatherback turtles at Indira Point, India's most southerly tip on Great Nicobar island.

They, and 16 to 20 families living next to the lighthouse there, had disappeared, said Inspector General S.B. Deol.

"We tried but failed to find the families or the scientists. Since Indira Point is just 140 kilometres away from Sumatra, the tsunami waves perhaps did not give them any chance."

Although most of the northern Andaman Islands were relatively undamaged, the tsunami caused extensive destruction on Little Andaman, flattening a settlement called Hut Bay.

One survivor, M.T. Naidu, said he had ferried his family to safety on the back of a moped before the wave caught him, breaking his foot. Their village was destroyed, and the 10,000-strong community had been evacuated, he said. Many people had died, Mr Naidu added.

Quake survivors fend off starvation, crocs

by NEELESH MISHRA
Published by ASSOCIATED PRESS

Received fromWILHELM KLEIN
wilhelmklein@web.de

1 Jan 2005

First mammoth waves washed over their villages, leaving not a single hut standing. Then the survivors' ordeal began: days of thirst, hunger and miles of walking until - just at the point of rescue - a hungry pack of crocodiles tried to snap them up.

The refugees lived to tell the tale, thanks to Indian seamen who shot at the menacing crocodiles as the fleeing refugees made their way to a rescue ship.

"As we were returning, two or three crocodiles started coming toward us," Sister Charity, a 32-year-old nun, told The Associated Press on Thursday. "The Navy officers had to fire their revolvers to ward off the crocodiles to protect us."

Sister Charity, who was rescued from Hut Bay island, was among survivors who told harrowing stories as they emerged from the isolated Andaman and Nicobar islands.

Crocodiles are common across Southeast Asia and the South Pacific and the animal flesh eaters are among the many dangers survivors are facing after Sunday's disaster. After a tsunami in Papua New Guinea several years ago crocodiles feasted on corpses scattered along the beaches.

In this remote spot in India, rescuers followed the stench to find rotting corpses in jungles on the 30 or so of the territory's 500 islands that are inhabited, officials said.

Survivors brought to Port Blair, the territory's capital, said they had not eaten for two days and also had to fend off the crocodiles that were swept ashore by the huge waves.

Mohammad Yusef, a 60-year-old fisherman from Tea Top village on Car Nicobar island, told AP his village was wiped out. "There's not a single hut which is standing," he said.

Yusef said he and his extended family of 20 walked a dozen miles to reach a devastated, but functioning airfield on the island where thousands of people were being evacuated by India's air force. His family was brought to a Roman Catholic Church in Port Blair.

Yusef said there were about 15 villages around Car Nicobar's shore and all were destroyed.

"Everything is gone. Most of the people have gone up to the hills and are afraid to come down," he said.

Despite their travails, some people vowed to return home and start again.

"We are broken, but this is not the end of life," said George Aberdeen, a 25-year-old coconut farmer whose village on Car Nicobar was washed away Sunday. "We will rebuild our lives. It will be difficult - but the whole family will do it together."

Just how many villages and families remain was unclear.

The International Red Cross said 30,000 people might be missing on the island chains, which are more than 700 miles southeast of India's mainland and have a population of 350,000. The islands' administrator, Lt. Gov. Ram Kapse, said about 400 bodies had been cremated or buried and 3,000 were missing.

Authorities prevented journalists and representatives of international aid groups such as Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders and CARE from visiting the islands to assess the damage and death toll.

At a makeshift refugee center at the Nirmala Convent School, papier-mache stars still hung from the Christmas Mass as hundreds of people sat under blue plastic tarps while women in white saris served bowls of rice and lentils.

Langley Matenga, George Aberdeen's brother-in-law, told of how he and his family of 10 fled the waves that engulfed their village, Mallaca, where some 500 Hindu, Muslim and Christian families lived.

"We were trying to run ahead of the water. When we turned around, all the houses were gone," said Matenga, an indigenous Nicobarese. "Within five minutes, everything was gone. It was Sunday morning and we were planning to go to church - and suddenly there was no church."

But there were few tears or hysterics among the thousands of survivors being ferried by boat and helicopter to Port Blair.

"The Nicobarese are very calm people. They have taken this with a tremendous sense of maturity," said Deputy Inspector-General A.N. Basudev Rao.

The 30,000 Nicobarese are the largest group among the tribal peoples that account for about one-tenth of the islands' population.

Some of the smaller indigenous groups, numbering only a few hundred each and mostly dwindling, maintain little contact with outsiders. They disappear into the forest when strangers approach and authorities hope that is the case now as they search for survivors.

"They might be hiding in forests and taking shelter in places where we haven't reached yet," Rao said.

Helicopters flying from 10 ships flew over the islands looking for signs of life, or mounds of dead.

Rao said finding and disposing of bodies on the islands was a daunting task. "A huge number of trees have fallen. There is a lot of slush," he told AP.

Nearly all the jetties on the islands were smashed by the waves, so search parties are using small wooden and rubber boats to land on beaches.

"The rescue parties are approaching inch by inch," Rao said. "There is also a lot of stench. From the stench, they are trying to follow the direction to the bodies."

Six Indian air force AN-32 cargo planes made dozens of flights from Port Blair to the air base on Car Nicobar, bringing back 80 to 90 villagers on each run.

About 580 survivors from the island of Hud Bay arrived by ship before dawn Thursday. The waves were so fierce that most of those who got aboard were men, who had to swim from shore. They said more than 800 people were dead or missing on the island.

"We just managed to save our lives," said Dana Amma, 60. "All our houses, our cattle, everything is gone. We don't know what to do."

[ Go to HOME ]

[ Go to HEAD OF THIS NEWS ]