To India Survivors, Promises Ring Hollow : Earthquake: The prime minister vows to rebuild devastated villages, but residents are skeptical.

Shukla Bhai Mali did not bother to greet Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao when he paid his first visit to this devastated and remote disaster zone Monday.

The prime minister dropped out of the sky in a helicopter, promising new earthquake-proof houses for all and tons of government relief, which has yet to reach the region’s 130,000 survivors five days after Sasthur and dozens of other villages became graveyards for at least 10,000 peasants.

The widowed Mali was too busy digging out her own meager stake for the future. With her bare hands, she tunneled into the flattened remains of her tiny house, hunting for anything left of value in the wreckage caused by the temblor that killed her family, her friends and most of her village: a pair of scissors, a corrugated tin sheet, a few sticks, a wire--anything to start over.

Her destination? A nearby field of harvested sugar cane where the descendants of generations in Sasthur are already building rickety, leaky lean-tos to serve as their emergency homes for an uncertain future.

Such is the fate of survivors of India’s worst natural disaster in half a century.

As the prime minister toured Sasthur and other hard-hit villages, apologizing for the chaotic relief efforts and thanking the world for its generous donations, authorities announced that they are nearly finished counting the known dead. Their tally: 9,550.

The thousands of missing, whose numbers led relief agencies to estimate that as many as 30,000 may have died in the quake, either fled the region or lie buried forever under the rubble, they said.

By Monday, the dead were buried or had been burned on mass funeral pyres. It was time for the living.

“I know your loss is great and irreparable,” Rao told small groups of villagers in Sasthur and the district headquarters in Latur. “I promise you maximum help.”

But as Rao, state and local government officials promised to the press and public that they would streamline relief and ultimately compensate each victim, it was clear that their efforts were getting off to a slow start.

Such promises were met with skepticism from survivors like Mali, testimony to not just days but decades of official neglect.

“If it comes, it comes. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t,” Mali said during a short break from her digging soon after Rao had left. “If any relief comes, it will come only to the village chief, and he will distribute it as he likes.

“I don’t have a husband. I don’t have a job. Now I have no home. The future? We will just wait and see.”

Even reduced to rubble Sasthur is a classic portrait of rural India, particularly among the poorest of the poor. It was the poor who died and suffered most in Thursday’s earthquake; the rich endured.

Every stone and mud house in Sasthur was flattened. At least 2,000 people in this village of 6,000 died. The only two structures left standing, both built of concrete, were owned by the village’s two largest landlords, village chief R.G. Patil and Shivaji Kishanrao Deshmukh, the descendant of generations of wealthy landowners and the richest man in town. Each man owns more than 50 acres of the farmland where many of the other villagers have worked for generations.

But even their homes bear dangerous cracks from the tremors that registered up to magnitude 6.4. Both men said their futures are as dubious as those of poor who lived among them.

“Yes, I will move. I will have to move,” Deshmukh said as he surveyed the damage inside the well-built home that protected his entire family. “But where, I don’t know. We cannot go far, for the land will die. And without the land, we will die. . . .

“But this is a question for the government. They will do everything for this. . . . It is my right to ask them.”

And ask is what village chief Patil did when he met Rao for the first time Monday after an Indian air force helicopter dropped the prime minister off in the village, which is a five-hour drive from any major city.

In reply, the nation’s top elected official told the 45-year-old Patil that he plans to use the millions of dollars in donations for a national emergency fund to reconstruct the entire village with earthquake-resistant homes. After Rao had departed for other, less devastated villages, Patil was grateful but skeptical.

With some reason. For a year now, Patil and chiefs of nearby villages have been trying to alert authorities in New Delhi to the clear threat of a disaster like the one that struck last week.

“We have been getting these tremors for one year now, and many times the government was told about it,” Patil said. “These were warnings. But six months ago, some experts came here from New Delhi and produced a report that said the tremors were very light and were no threat to the people.”

It was that kind of attitude that Patil said has made him and his fellow villagers so skeptical about the prime minister’s promises. For Rao promised not merely to build new homes on the site but to do so before Jan. 26.

“Seeing is believing,” said Patil, adding that even if the prime minister makes good on his promise, life for the village will be almost unbearable in the meantime.