India Quake Toll Reaches 10,000 : Disaster: Prime minister puts army on ‘war footing’ after nation’s worst temblor in half a century. Officials fear the number of dead will greatly increase.

A remote region of southwest India was a mass graveyard Thursday after a devastating earthquake killed at least 10,000 people inside their homes as they slept.

About 10,000 people were reported injured, and authorities feared that the death toll will rise substantially in India’s worst quake in half a century.

The U.S. Geological Survey in Washington located the quake’s epicenter about 275 miles southeast of Bombay and said it registered a magnitude 6.4.

The earthquake ripped through more than 50 villages at 3:56 a.m. and caused damage in the three western and southern states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. It was felt at least 400 miles from the epicenter.

The death tolls given by state officials and news reports varied from 6,200 to 16,000, and all appeared to be based on confirmed statistics and estimates.

Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao ordered army relief operations on “war footing” to respond to the disaster in the remote, sugar-processing belt of India and authorized $3.3 million for relief and rescue operations. Offers of aid began pouring in from outside India, including from Pakistan, its longtime enemy, and Russia, in the midst of its own political turmoil.

Some people survived after the quake when frantic rescuers heard their cries for help or saw a hand reaching out from beneath toppled walls and roofs, Press Trust of India reported.

Tens of thousands of relatives scratched through the debris, removing mud and masonry with their bare hands in the hunt for survivors, residents contacted by telephone said. Rescuers using cranes and bulldozers worked through the night under pouring rain to pull out victims.

N. Raghunathan, chief secretary of Maharashtra, the hardest-hit state, said more than 2,000 bodies had been recovered.

He said 3,000 people were killed in each of two districts, Umarga and Killari.

About 10,000 people were injured, Raghunathan said.

“Those few seconds (when the earthquake hit) seemed to last forever,” said Solani Bhagwat, 35, a resident of Umarga. “I didn’t know how it happened. It was dark and I could hear people shrieking and howling. Only when the sun came out did I realize they were all trapped in their houses.”

Inside the town’s small, overcrowded hospital, hundreds of injured people lay wailing on floors or in a tent set up in a courtyard.

“We don’t have enough drugs and bandages,” Dr. Ahiwin Solekar said as he rushed from one patient to another.

Telephone, electricity and water lines were cut, and there was little word on what happened to Latur, a city of half a million people located about 20 miles north of the epicenter.

“It looks like a human tragedy of unimaginable proportions,” said S. V. Baraoker, director general of police in Maharashtra.

“We’ve never seen anything on this scale before,” state Finance and Planning Minister Ramrao Adik said.

Some local politicians said the death toll could be as high as 25,000.

Huge cracks opened in the ground, swallowing homes, witnesses said. No details were available on the size of the cracks or how many homes tumbled into them.

“The rising sun created darkness for us this morning, swallowed up our villages, and made our houses into tombs,” a survivor told a reporter.

Soldiers and policemen rushed to the remote region, bringing stretchers, tents, medical supplies, earthmovers, bulldozers and mobile hospitals.

Relief workers had trouble reaching some villages that recently lost their roads and bridges to heavy monsoon rains.

Russian, Swiss and British rescue teams were on standby after offering to help dig out buried survivors.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies on Thursday sent $66,000 in emergency funds to help.

In shattered villages, crowds of people roamed through the debris, praying for their lost relatives.

The quake also awakened people in Bombay, Bangalore and Madras, up to 400 miles from the epicenter. No deaths were reported in the three major cities.

Across southern India, people fled their shaking homes in panic.

The stricken region, a sugar cane and cotton-growing area, stands over a geological formation called the Deccan Plateau, a land rich in volcanic soil and solidified lava spread over thousands of square miles.

Dr. Harsh Gupta, director of the National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad, India, about 120 miles from the epicenter, said although the magnitude 6.4 reading did not put the quake in the category of an extremely severe earthquake, the high death toll was the result of “people (having) built mud houses with stone rooftops of very flimsy construction” in a thickly populated region.

He said there is almost no “sedimentary layer” of earth in the relatively barren plains area to cushion the shock waves, allowing them to travel greater distances than those normally associated with an earthquake of this level.

Several aftershocks were recorded. But they were of low intensity, and it is believed that they did not cause any more damage, a spokesman in India’s Seismological Office in New Delhi said.

The series of tremors were the deadliest in South Asia since independence from Britain in 1947.

The region’s worst earthquake this century was on May 31, 1935, when 30,000 people were killed in the Quetta area of what is now Pakistan.

At least 10,700 were killed in the Nepal-Bihar border region Jan. 15, 1934, according to official records.

The U.S. Geological Survey said Thursday’s earthquake was the same strength as the 1971 Sylmar-San Fernando temblor.

Officials say location is an important factor in earthquake casualty tolls. Just this month a much stronger, magnitude 7.2 temblor occurred off the Pacific coast of Mexico near its border with Guatemala. Only one person died because heavily populated areas were relatively far away.

But the Sylmar-San Fernando quake occurred in a highly populated area of Los Angeles. It caused 58 deaths, compared to the thousands reported Thursday in India.

California state geologist James F. Davis said rural construction in India--using mud, thatch and stone--is in some respects similar to the adobe building that has proved so vulnerable in the American Southwest.

Not only are construction codes lacking in Third World countries, Davis said, but there have been few studies in these countries that would pinpoint certain areas as seismically active.

Times staff writer Ken Reich contributed to this report.