A baby girl and a teenager were found alive at the weekend, eight days after western India's earthquake killed more than 30,000 people. The rescue came at a time when relief crews had abandoned all hope of recovering more survivors and were spraying chemicals to prevent an epidemic breaking out from rotting bodies and an infestation of rats feeding on them.
Officials said army engineers clearing away rubble in Palaswa village in the badly affected Kutch region stumbled upon 11month-old Tejal buried under a mangled mass of concrete and steel that was once her home. For her overjoyed family, she was a "dead child" brought back to life, as they had already performed her last rites.
Arjun Bhai (17) was pulled out of a well on Saturday in nearby Sikara village, near the flattened town of Bahachau. He had jumped down the well shaft when the earthquake struck on January 26th. "We discovered he was in there when he started throwing stones out of the well," a local resident said. India's military, which is leading the relief and rehabilitation effort in India's worst natural calamity in 50 years, has begun identifying hundreds of children orphaned by the earthquake and will post their names on a website for adoption. Many children survived as they were in the open taking part in the Republic Day celebrations when the earthquake struck, while their parents were at home watching an army parade in New Delhi live on TV.
Soldiers and relief workers, wearing surgical gloves and masks as protection against inhaling decomposing matter and dust, sprinkled disinfectant by hand and operated cranes and earthmovers to clear away the rubble at the weekend.
Life in the flattened district capital, Bhuj, was slowly struggling back to normal, with some tea shops reopening and vendors selling cigarettes and food by the roadside. But thousands of the 500,000 people rendered homeless by the earthquake were still spending nights in the open in freezing desert temperatures as relief to all 1,016 affected villages and eight towns was slow.
"We found many people sleeping on the streets without any tents, and without any blankets," Red Cross official Dr Richard Munz said in Bhuj.
Officials said tens of thousands of unregistered migrant workers from eastern India working in Kutch's numerous salt mines and textile and jewellery factories may never be counted as victims as there was no record of them. "Between 400 and 500 migrant workers were employed by each of the six salt factories and there is no trace of them," said Mr Razzak Ali, a labourer from eastern Bengal state.
The Gujarati Interior Minister, Mr Haren Pandya, who is supervising relief operations, said it would take two years to reconstruct the region at a cost of cost over 80 billion rupees (£1.18 billion). Officials said towns like Bhuj, Bhachau and Anjar would be totally rebuilt.
