The Annual Plan of Pondicherry for 2005-06 has been fixed at Rs 810 crore inclusive of a relief package of the order of Rs 100 crore to the tsunami-hit people. This was decided at a meeting between

Even as relief work continues in areas devastated by the tsunami, the corpus of the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund has quietly swelled to around Rs 500 crore. The money is said to be the largest corpus ever collected through the fund.
This is just money that has been sent as Demand Drafts. "Cheques still need to be processed and taken into account," said a PMO official.

Searching through the rubble of his home for anything still whole, Laksmiah Poleh can see life's options quite clearly. He can give up and move his family back to their home state on the mainland and, if he's lucky, find work as a tenant farmer making Rs 1,700 a month.

When Baskaran, a fisherman in Nochikuppam, Chennai, is asked what the fisherfolk normally eat for breakfast

Tsunami - How it happened

Bells jingled, colourful carnivals spread cheer; Asia was filled with festivity, as the people celebrated the Nativity of Jesus Christ. The festival of joy had just begun. But death was just hours away. When the most powerful earthquake in more than 40 years struck deep under the Indian Ocean, the Indonesian island of Banda Aceh became a mass graveyard.

When the tsunami waves lashed the eastern coast, the Government of India seemed as much at sea as the people affected by the disaster. Information just did not move out of Delhi to the disaster areas.

The archipelago of the Andaman and Nicobar islands consists of 572 islands; 35 are known to be inhabited. These are home to five tribes. The Jarawas, Sentinelese and Onges are Negrito tribes. The Andamanese have ceased to be a tribe and a pure-blood Andamanese is a rarity. The remaining two are mongoloid tribes, the Nicobarese and the Shompen.

On January 4, the government announced that 901 people died and 6,010 were missing in the tsunami that hit Andaman and Nicobar islands on December 26. That cannot even be a half-truth. Samir Acharya, secretary of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, said that according to four Nicobarese tribal chiefs, around 10,000 people, a third of the island's population, had died in Car Nicobar.

Gordon Brown launched Britain's campaign for a Marshall plan for Africa when he called on the international community to harness the "passion of compassion" generated by the Asian tsunami disaster to