Indian Army Cracks Down on Earthquake Spectators

The Indian army on Sunday cracked down on a human wave of well-wishers, thrill-seekers and amateur aid-givers who flooded flattened villages where thousands had died, and political leaders appealed for cash--not relief goods--as authorities struggled to bring order to the aftermath of India’s worst earthquake in half a century.

Amid occasional monsoon rains that turned key rural roads to mud, thousands of army troops mobilized to drive out the tens of thousands of onlookers who had clogged roads and hampered efforts to clear dead bodies from the wreckage of more than two dozen villages.

Police were ordered to set up roadblocks and police lines to isolate the refugees from the spectators and speed delivery of emergency water, medicine and food.

The army also intensified its effort to erect emergency tent cities and helped local civilian officers with the nightmarish logistics of coordinating the dozens of Indian relief agencies, some of which emerged overnight in a national frenzy to aid the estimated 130,000 homeless.

Awash with donations from India and abroad, authorities in the worst-hit Maharashtra state urgently appealed for an end to an avalanche of relief goods--particularly perishables--that have overtaxed their distribution system.

“I want money,” declared the state’s chief minister, Sharad Pawar, in a weekend interview from his makeshift command headquarters near the hardest-hit districts.

Pawar said his “most urgent requirement” is an estimated $100 million, “which will be spent constructing new homes at alternative sites for each of the survivors and their families.” The state’s top elected official also called on the entire working class in Maharashtra to donate one day’s wage “for their unfortunate brethren.”

With thousands of villagers still unaccounted for and thousands more already cremated anonymously without formal identification, the exact death toll may never be known.

Chief Secretary N. Ragunathan reported that the toll as of Sunday was 9,403. When reporters questioned the figure, which is about one-third the 30,000 dead estimated by independent relief agencies, Ragunathan replied sternly: “What we are giving are facts. The toll figures given by the media are the guesstimates.”

At the ruined villages, meanwhile, the survivors were spectacle for hordes of onlookers.

“Our woes have become a sightseeing pleasure trip,” said one survivor in the devastated village Rajegaon, a remote ruin where little excavation work had begun. “They come to the villages with handkerchiefs over their mouths, and they don’t even remove a single stone.”