India barring relief efforts

Fighting to survive without water or food since the tsunami, villagers on a remote southern archipelago forbidden to outsiders are starving and desperate for humanitarian aid to reach them, survivors and officials said Friday.

"There is nothing to eat there. There is no water. In a couple of days, people will start dying of hunger,'' said Anup Ghatak, a utilities contractor from Campbell Bay island, as he was being evacuated to Port Blair, the capital of India's island territory of Andaman and Nicobar.

India has so far denied permission to international aid groups trying to gain access to go deep into the islands, the last tsunami blind spot where casualties are not known but feared in the thousands.

[...]

Relief operations on the remote archipelago - which starts approximately 300 miles northwest of the quake's epicenter - have been limited to Indian officials and local volunteers who have struggled to deliver tons of rations, clothes, bedsheets, oil, and other items, hampered by lack of transportation to the remote islands.

"We would like to be invited to join the relief effort, and to be part of any helicopter or boat trip to the area,'' an official with the Paris-based Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said at a news conference on Thursday.

International humanitarian group Oxfam also requested entry, but Lt. Gov. Ram Kapse, administrator of the federally governed territory, said no decision had been made. He said four Indian volunteer groups have been allowed to travel to the islands.

Entry to foreigners is prohibited on most of the hundreds of islands scattered over some 4,350 miles in the Bay of Bengal, and even Indians need special permits to travel there.

Some 40 percent of the densely forested area is designated as a tribal reserve where indigenous people live; the remaining area is protected for wood cultivation.

  Guardian article

How nice of mother nature to lend a hand in ridding a country of its unwanted indigenous.

I saw a news report yesterday with a film of that conference where the (very agitated) Doctors Without Borders official plead for access. "We'll let you know in the morning," said the obviously healthy government official.

These people haven't even had water to drink since Sunday. Hope they have a lot of coconut trees that held on to their fruits.