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India gives up on 6 islands
02/03/2005 08:12 - (SA)
Kamorta, India - India has given up hope of rebuilding six islands in the tsunami-hit Andaman and Nicobar archipelago where 5 764 people are still listed as missing and infrastructure is in shambles two months after the towering waves struck.
A military-led project to rebuild 36 inhabited islands which span 800km from Myanmar to Indonesia ahead of the mid-April monsoons has been modified as the task is proving too enormous, Indian officials said.
About 40 500 people still crowd 150 makeshift camps waiting for their isles to be rebuilt by the Integrated Relief Command (IRC), comprising the military and the civilian administration, set up by India to restore the Andamans.
"Six islands are being abandoned and their populations shifted to seven others which are in our focus for immediate rehabilitation," IRC chief Aditya Singh said, referring to a string of southern islands which bore the brunt of the ferocious waves.
The seven include crocodile-infested Kamorta, 384km from the Andamanese capital of Port Blair, Nancowry, Great Nicobar, Nicobar, Pillomollow and Tilangchang.
'It is chaos'
Singh, however, said they were not completely abandoning nearby Chawra, fabled for its breath-taking beaches, and will try to revive its water sources once they have rebuilt the other seven.
"The '3-Rs' for us reads 'rehabilitation, reconstruction and resurgence', but it is a task of a scale so gigantic that it is beyond imagination," said Singh, faced with the task of building 10 000 shelters ahead of the drenching monsoon rains.
Seventy percent of Andaman's jetties were washed away making it difficult to transport supplies and equipment.
The IRC chief, an army general, said everything being transported had to be transferred to the islands from ships anchored about a kilometre out at sea by canoe. The IRC in its latest report counts 1 386 people as dead and has listed 5 764 as missing in the archipelago but relief workers say the authorities may have vastly miscalculated due to an absence of records of thousands of people who have settled illegally on the islands.
"We are turning to donors and NGOs for prefabricated structures for government offices because these are expensive items," Singh said.
Relief workers said the IRC's operations needed to be streamlined, claiming some 170 tonnes of tenting went to waste because the canvas went to one island and the poles and clamps went to others.
"It was hilarious to see stacks of poles arriving in Nicobar while the tenting material was rushed to Nancowry and the clamps needed to fix them flown to Campbell Bay," said private relief operator Deepak Bose.
"It is just one example. We have come across thousands of them. It is chaos. One island receives only sugar while another may just get salt to mix in its tea," he said.
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