As rescue workers raced to recover bodies buried under rubble and funeral pyres dotted the disaster-struck areas in western India's Kutch region yesterday, desperately-needed aid was still reaching only the district headquarters in Bhuj, which has become the focus of the relief effort.
Relief trucks were speeding through the disaster-struck area throwing food off the back. But locals said the distribution was confined only to the main streets. And so desperate people lay in wait for relief trucks, forcibly stopped them and plundered them of their cargo a week after the earthquake ripped through the area.
Officials from Kutch admitted that gangs of robbers continued to roam the region unchecked, looting at gun point, despite claims by the state government that additional police had been despatched to the region.
Following reports of widespread pillaging, the army has cordoned off the flattened walled city of Bhuj, where scores of gold and silversmiths plied their centuries-old trade of making delicate jewellery and ornaments, and where large amounts of the precious metals remained buried under debris.
Hindu astrological predictions in a local Gujarati publication of an even bigger quake caused further panic in the region. "We will go inside only after the third or fourth of February when the ill effects of the planets is over," said Mr Naresh Singhvi, a cigarette stall owner in Ahmedabad. "There is going to be a very severe earthquake, more powerful than this one," he added.
The astrologers claim that Pluto, the planet of death in Hindu astrology in conjunction with the aggressive Mars are aligned ominously at the moment, spelling greater doom and destruction.
Meanwhile, homeless survivors of the earthquake yesterday filed police complaints against builders of collapsed structures in the state's commercial capital Ahmedabad, where 660 people died in the earthquake. Police said investigations had begun into sub-standard materials used by builders in seven of 55 of the city's high-rise apartment blocks that collapsed in the tremors.
"Right now, not many people are coming forward with complaints, but soon we hope to register more cases," a police official said. Locals said only one of the many builders, who had sold them flats for astronomical sums, turned up to mourn the dead. The rest are missing, having either fled the city or gone into hiding. Some had even threatened the residents against filing police complaints against them.
"We will lynch them [the builders] when we find them," said an enraged Mr Shaktisnh Jhala whose five-storey apartment block in one of Ahmedabad's upmarket neighbourhood collapsed. Along with thousands of others across Ahmedabad, Mr Jhala had spent his entire life's savings on the flat. And, like them for the past week, he has been sleeping on the streets outside his former home, braving freezing temperatures.
Officials estimate that at least 30,000 people had died in the earthquake, which also flattened villages and towns and cut power and water supplies. The state government said 14,240 bodies had been recovered so far, 62,000 people were injured, with 1,600 having undergone amputations.
And while no typhoid or cholera cases were reported across Kutch, as had been feared, officials remained concerned that an epidemic could erupt.
An earthquake measuring 4.2 on the Richter scale shook central Turkey and the south-western province of Burdur yesterday, with no immediate reports of casualties or damage, the Anatolia news agency reported.
