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

"... Your ministry is responsible for all the destruction and killing of 12,000 people on the coast..."

Tsunami - How it happened

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.

As Asia prepares to rebuild itself after the killer wave, it will take a lot more than just political bickering to prevent a similar situation from recurring