Rescuers in India's Andaman and Nicobar isles struggled today to assess the toll from this week's tsunami in areas untouched by the modern world but said the destruction might not be as bad as feared.
The biggest problem for Indian authorities was getting to remote islands, some of them home to fierce, Stone Age tribal people, with road links broken and ports destroyed, making it hard for vessels to dock.
But Indian army officials, who had manged to travel along a narrow, winding road on Car Nicobar island, said early indications were the damage was not be as bad as first thought.
"Now that we've managed to reach and establish contact with some of these tribal communities, it's possible that the estimate of missing and dead that the authorities had given may be on the higher side," Colonel Sarb Jit, the officer leading the mission, said.
The tsunami, triggered by a massive undersea earthquake off nearby Indonesia, killed nearly 80,000 people along Indian Ocean coastline from Thailand to Africa.
Officials estimate 12,500 people were killed in India although only 7,000 deaths have been confirmed so far.
Bodies still litter the Andaman and Nicobar islands, which had a total population of 356,000 and are closer to Myanmar and Indonesia than to the Indian mainland.
In Malacca village on Car Nicobar island the stench of death hung over scattered palm fronds and rubble. People complained they had received hardly any food or water.
Many people in the islands belong to one of six primitive tribes, some still nomadic hunter-gatherers with virtually no contact with the outside world.
Five of the tribes have almost died out and the biggest of the five does not have many more than 200 members.
The government said last night 40 members of the Negrito Onge tribe, numbering a total of only 100 members after decades of declining numbers, had been rescued but there had been no contact with dozens of members of the tiny Sentinelese tribe, who live in a reserved island and are hostile to outsiders.
Officials plan to send a rescue boat to North Sentinel island where the Sentinelese live.
The government also said it was worried about the Mongoloid Shompens, who live in the Great Nicobar island in the far south of the archipelago, and who do not number many more than 200.
"The fate of Shompens ... is not yet known as all bridges are broken," the Ministry of Tribal Affairs said in a statement.
The ministry said the most numerous tribe, the Nicobarese, thousands of whom live in the badly hit Nicobar region, is expected to have suffered scores of dead. The Nicobarese is the only group to grow crops.
Dozens of aftershocks continue to hit the region and islanders are terrified they could trigger more giant waves. Indian airlines are operating extra flights to the islands to take out people who want to leave.