India: over 14,000 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced

India: over 14,000 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced

Arun Kumar
4 January 2005

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The tsunami that killed over 140,000 people in southern Asia has taken at least 14,000 lives in India. Nine days after the catastrophe, Indian governments at the state and federal levels have yet to establish relief operations in a number of areas. This slow and inadequate response is now threatening thousands more lives as epidemics begin to emerge.

A total of 2,260km of India’s southern coastline were affected. The waves reached 10 metres in height and penetrated as far as three kilometres inland. Most of the low-lying Andaman and Nicobar islands were inundated.

Over the weekend, Indian authorities put the estimated death toll at 14,488 comprising 9,451 dead and more than 5,000 missing, feared dead. The actual figure, however, is likely to be far higher as emergency workers continue to retrieve corpses.

The southern state of Tamil Nadu was the worst affected with nearly 8,000 killed. The remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands situated in the Bay of Bengal account for more than 5,000. Those killed in other southern Indian states include Kerala 166, Andhra Pradesh 106 and the Union Territory of Pondicherry 574.

In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the scale of the disaster is unknown. Although the official death toll stands at just over 5,000, conservative estimates put the figure at 10,000. Almost 80 percent of the islands, which had a population of about 350,000, are yet to be surveyed.

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