Tsunami fear looms large, natives squeeze towards centre of island

Car Nicobar, Aug 27 (UNI) Standing on the sea-shore of a remote Indian Island, Car Nicobar, Rebert Henry stares desolately at a marooned piece of land where his beautiful house stood just 20 months back, full of life and laughter.

The place called Mus was one of the well-managed and well-planned villages in Car Nicobar before tsunami ravaged the area. Houses were built along the lonely road which connects the harbour with Malacca, the capital village of the island.

Now, as Henry surveys the land, nothing is left except the good old memories. The coastal area, where huts, houses, shops, school and other offices had mushroomed were cleanly swept away by tsunami waves. In most cases even the foundations of buildings were gobbled up by the giant waves.

Nicobar group of islands are mostly dominated by Nicobari Tribals, who suffered the brunt of the cruel waves on December 26, 2004. The psychological and social impact was such that all the survivors have left coastal areas and moved inside towards the widespread jungles.

This in turn have squeezed the villages towards the centre of the islands.

Located in the south-east of the Bay of Bengal, the Nicobar Islands comprised 22 islands, of which only 12 were inhabited. ''People of Nicobar had a habit of constructing their Nicobari huts and houses close to the sea. All the 15 villages of Car Nicobar were located along the coastal belt before the tsunami and there was nothing at the centre of the village except widely spread coconut plantation,'' Arup Kumar Roy of HELP (Healthy Environment and Less Pollution), an NGO of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, said.

''There are some advantages of living close to the sea,'' Mr Roy added. ''It was easy for the Nicobari people to go fishing in their traditional fishing boats(Hodi) and as all the villages were along the coastal areas only one ring-shaped road was enough to connect all the scattered villages,'' he explained.

Now all villages have moved away from the sea. Some of them like Lapathy, Small Lapathy, Perka have shifted deep inside the forest, leaving behind some offhandedly written boards, with 'Erstwhile Lapathy', 'Erstwhile Small Lapathy', and so on. ''The whole island, it seems, has been squeezed,'' Mr Roy remarked.

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