Death Toll Hits 400 in FireThat Engulfed Indian Youth : Disaster: Ghastly aftermath leaves country shaken. Forty-eight more people succumb to injuries from blaze, stampede.

Sandeep Mittal came away Sunday badly shaken by the scene of one of India’s ghastliest tragedies in recent memory--a fire that sent a blazing tent onto the heads of schoolchildren. It was so sudden and intense that it burned all 1,500 chairs where the pupils and their parents were sitting, he found.

“I still cannot believe what these people did to deserve such an end,” said Mittal, 23, a government contractor from Sirsa.

The flash fire--and the killer stampede toward the single exit that it touched off--claimed at least 400 lives, about half of them children, in the rural northern Indian town of Dabwali, authorities said Sunday.

Forty-eight people who did not die outright in the Saturday afternoon fire and ensuing panic succumbed overnight to their injuries.

Many of the victims were between 5 and 17.

“The heat was so much, the children couldn’t even cry,” a local man, Kumar--who said he helped 30 youngsters to safety--told Reuters news service.

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The blaze swept through the Rajiv Marriage Palace during an annual prize-giving ceremony held by the Dayanand Anglo Vedic School. Police said they suspected that a short circuit in poorly insulated wiring, strung between hanging lights, may have sparked the inferno.

But some survivor accounts indicated that a gas cylinder used to heat food may have exploded.

“There was a big bang, and then the entire building was burning and everyone was rushing toward the door. Some tried to break the wall in order to escape. Children were being crushed to death. There was a mess of bodies all over,” Mohan Lal Kaushik, hospitalized with burns on more than 40% of his body, said from his hospital bed.

Sunday morning, parents whose sons and daughters were still missing searched frantically through the ranks of corpses, some of them burned to the bone, that had been laid on the grass outside Dabwali’s Civil Hospital. Grieving adults who had found their dead children wrapped their remains in white cotton shrouds to prepare them for cremation, the Hindu rite for disposal of the dead.

“The entire town is in a state of shock and sorrow,” Mittal said in a telephone interview.

Y. C. Bhardwaj, a subdivisional magistrate, said the number of deaths was certain to rise. He was hastily sent to the market and cotton-farming town of 50,000 people 175 miles northwest of New Delhi to replace Somnath Kamboj, who had been the VIP guest at the school ceremony and died.

Official sources said 250 people were injured, 142 of them listed in serious conditions at area hospitals. Authorities said 285 of the dead had been identified by midday Sunday and their bodies handed over to their families.

Throughout the day in the town, the grieving conducted rites for the dead, with hundreds of funeral pyres flaring amid Hindu and Sikh chants.

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The loss of so many young lives, especially at a time of year that is particularly joyous to India’s 16 million Christians, stunned all India and was banner headline news in most daily newspapers.

The Rajiv Marriage Palace, used for marriages and other social functions in the rural township of Hariana state, had brick walls 10 feet high enclosing an area of about 1,000 square yards.

It was covered with a cloth canopy and hung with cheap synthetic silk decorations, which police said may have fed the blaze.

High piles of metal chairs fused by the heat lay around the debris of the building Sunday.

“The entire place is charred beyond recognition,” Mittal said.

Bhajan Lal, chief minister of Hariana state, said that from now on, organizers of similar functions will have to ensure that there are at least four entrances and exits.

Lal, who flew to Dabwali on Sunday morning for a firsthand look, also said a mass cremation would be held today of all victims’ bodies that had not been identified.

Sixty-nine corpses placed on view at the town’s hospital had yet to be claimed by relatives or acquaintances, he said.

As is often the case after catastrophic accidents in India, authorities quickly announced that compensation will be paid to families of victims: 100,000 rupees, or about $3,300, to Hariana households who lost a member, and half that to anyone who suffered serious injury.

Lal also said that a member of each bereaved family will be given a government job.