Kashmir: Estimates of the death toll following south Asia's devastating earthquake jumped to over 87,000 yesterday, exactly a month after the disaster struck as millions of survivors braced themselves for the affected region's savage Himalayan winter.
The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, working with local governments and aid agencies said the death toll in the October 8th earthquake in Pakistan, mostly in its Kashmir territory, jumped by some 13,000 fatalities after more bodies were recovered from under debris.
This significantly raised the government's official death toll of 73,000 announced last week.
India has reported 1,350 deaths in its portion of divided Kashmir.
Meanwhile, the UN humanitarian relief chief Jan Egeland said in New York earlier this week that survivors in Kashmir could "freeze to death if they do not get assistance in weeks" and urged everyone, from individuals to oil-rich nations, to be as generous as they were with other recent natural disasters.
"It's even more urgent than it was in these other hurricanes or tsunamis," Egeland said.
The UN has launched "Operation Winter Race" to rush shelter to around 200,000 people living at high altitudes above the snow line in the rugged Himalayas.
Around 150,000 of these survivors are expected to descend to tented camps at lower elevations as the upper Himalayan reaches have already had their first snowfall.
The quake that measured 7.6 on the Richter scale destroyed the homes of over three million people across Pakistan-administered Kashmir and the adjoining North West Frontier Province.
Survivors continue to stream into Kashmiri Pakistan's capital Muzaffarabad where they collect tents from aid agencies before trudging out of town with canvas and poles on their backs in search of any flat ground not already claimed by other survivors.
Others can be seen trekking along the precipitous Neelum river up to windy bluffs overlooking the city, where they dig into the slope with crowbars to carve a shelf big enough to pitch a tent. "Life is very difficult," Jamil (28) said in Muzaffarabad as he hauled a donated tent up freezing mountainside.
The relief effort is being hampered by a serious cash shortage as only $380 million of $1.4 billion pledged to Pakistan in all forms of aid since the earthquake struck, had been received so far.
The head of Pakistan's Central Bank expressed disappointment at the international community's aid response. "If the international donor community could have come up with a significant contribution to the relief fund, the burden on the government would have been manageable," Ishrat Husain said on the sidelines of an Islamic Financial Services Forum in Luxembourg on Monday.
However, at a news conference in Islamabad yesterday, UN aid officials hinted that funding and the efforts of aid workers had begun to yield some results.
"Perhaps for the first time since October 8th there is a sense of cautious optimism in the humanitarian community," local UN emergency coordinator Jan Vandemoortele said. "The job is colossal, but there is a feeling that this is a doable job. It is not mission impossible."