Many still marooned as epidemics threaten India's cyclone survivors

Bulldozers dumped hundreds of bloated corpses yesterday onto scarce dry patches of land for cremation across eastern India's cyclone-ravaged Orissa state, where around 10,000 people are feared dead and nearly 20 million affected by the storm, many of them still marooned, surrounded by water.

Officials warned of an epidemic breaking out across the state as tens of thousands of homeless people, without food or fresh drinking water, wrestled one another for helicopter-dropped supplies almost a week after the cyclone lashed the state, flattening buildings and homes, uprooting trees, electricity and telephone poles and burying rice fields deep under water.

The beginnings of an epidemic were emerging in Cuttack district, 30 miles north-east of the capital, Bhubaneshwar, from people drinking contaminated water. Officials said those admitted to hospital with water-borne diseases like gastro-enteritis, diarrhoea as well as malaria had begun fleeing the city, following food shortages.

Irate and hungry villagers looted shops and warehouses and set up road blocks along highways to stop vehicles, unmindful of the soldiers and paramilitary personnel deployed on security duty, seizing not only food but whatever they could find.

"The biggest challenge now is to deal with increasing instances of lawlessness and vandalism," state revenue minister Mr Jagganath Patnaik said.

"I cannot blame the people for looting food items," the state animal husbandry minister, Mr Padmaochan Panda said. They had not received any relief for days, he added.

Blaming the district administration for tardy relief operations, Mr Panda said officials had failed to store supplies despite advance warning of the cyclone.

Though the official death toll in the cyclone is still about 250, relief workers estimate more people may have been killed than in India's most deadly cyclone, which claimed 10,000 lives in 1971.