Up to 2,250 people were feared dead and thousands injured in the earthquake that shook the Indian subcontinent yesterday.
There was confusion about the extent of the death and destruction after the massive quake rocked buildings across India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh and sent millions of people scurrying into the open in panic.
Officials said the death toll in western India's badly hit urban areas of Gujarat state could rise as many people lay buried under the debris.
"The whole state has been affected and communications disrupted over vast areas," Gujarat's Home Minister, Mr Haren Pandya, said.
Army and paramilitary personnel quickly began clearing rubble, looking for survivors while the air force started flying in medical aid, food, tents and communication equipment to the affected region operating on a "war footing ".
Normally inadequate medical facilities struggled to cope with the injured as they poured into Gujarat's hospitals all day. The numbers prompted the state government to appeal for help to non-governmental organisations.
Reports from the region said the state administration was slow in dealing with the calamity and angry residents were laying siege to government offices demanding help.
New Delhi's residents endured around a minute of the violent tremors shortly before the Republic Day parade. After the parade, the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, called an emergency Cabinet meeting to deal with the crisis.
The Indian Meteorological Department said India's worst earthquake in half a century, measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale, struck at 8.46 a.m. local time and lasted over 45 seconds. Thirteen aftershocks of varying intensity followed for nearly four hours and experts said more tremors were likely over the next week before the subterranean tension was fully released.
"There are no set rules in an earthquake situation," meteorologist Mr S.K. Srivastav said.
Seismological experts said the earthquake, whose epicentre was located near the small town of Bhuj, in the marshy Rann of Kutch bordering Pakistan, some 500 miles south-west of Delhi was 30,000 times more intense than the atomic bombs dropped over Japan during the second World War.
The US Geological Survey, however, reported the tremor's magnitude at 7.9 on the Richter scale, making it the world's severest earthquake in 150 years.
Apart from widespread devastation in Bhuj and nearby towns like Morvi, the quake also destroyed a strategic air force radar station in the area in which 15 airmen died. It also killed four people in Pakistan's southern Sindh province, bordering Gujarat while its effects were felt in the northern cities of Lahore and Peshawar.
Tremors also rocked the Nepalese capital of Katmandu, hundreds of miles to the north, and the Bangladeshi border town of Satkhira to the east.
"It was like being on a swing as buildings shook violently, developed cracks and collapsed," Mr Vinay Kumar said in Gujarat's worst affected capital, Ahmedabad. There, over 200 people died after scores of multi-storeyed structures collapsed, water pipes burst and phone and power lines were uprooted. People were paralysed with fear, he added.
In India's financial capital, Bombay, people ran on to the streets as high-rise buildings shuddered, lifts trembled, window panes rattled and beds shook. In the eastern port city of Madras people began fleeing the local Republic Day parade in panic until officials on loudspeakers calmed them.
