2 decades after tsunami, survivors still counting cost of great wave
At least 10,749 people in India were killed. According to the then Thanjavur district collector, Tamil Nadu alone accounted for around 7,900 of the dead.
A Anjamma was sorting fish on the beach somewhere on the Tharangambadi coast when she saw a giant wave rise. She instantly dropped her catch of the day and began running towards her house where her mother was alone with her four children. “I was running and screaming at my mother to carry the children,” says Anjamma. Then the wave was upon her. “I lost my consciousness and I remembered waking up near my neighbour’s house. There was rubble on me.”

Anjamma saw her neighbour’s daughter’s hands dangling near the rubble and she pulled her out ; the girl was alive. Next, she limped toward the remains of her home. Only one of her four children was there. The rest of them had been washed away with her mother in the tsunami. “I only found my daughter Sowjanya lying there, unconscious, without clothes,” says Anjamma. She found the body of her four-year-old daughter, Sandhya, on the street and those of her remaining two children, Sharmili and Akhilan, in the hospital.
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The three children were buried in a mass burial ground in Tharangambadi in erstwhile Nagapattinam district, the worst hit region in Tamil Nadu. A 9.1 magnitude submarine earthquake in the Indian Ocean zone triggered a massive tsunami that wrecked India’s East coast.
It was December 26, 2004.
At least 10,749 people in India were killed, leaving several families homeless and some victims without a trace. According to the then Thanjavur district collector K Radhakrishnan, Tamil Nadu alone accounted for around 7,900 of the dead. And Anjamma’s district was the worst hit: “6,065 were from Nagapattinam which accounted for 75% of the deaths in the state,” says Radhakrishnan.
Family torn apart
Anjamma, along with her husband Ayyadurai and daughter Sowjanya, was relocated to a house allotted for tsunami survivors in Tharangambadi. “Sowjanya swallowed too much water in the tsunami but she somehow survived. But, her entire body has been bloated and swollen since then and she could never be healthy,” says Anjamma. The girl died in 2023. Anjamma has her photograph but doesn’t have a photo of any of her other children.
She does have two more children — post -tsunami babies, Kesavan, 19 and Sandhya, 16, named after their youngest daughter who died. Hundreds of families like Anjamma’s lost their children in the tsunami. Several mothers went through reverse sterilisation to have children – a government scheme to help women after the tsunami – since they had earlier gone through Tamil Nadu’s population control programme. Anjamma hadn’t, which made it easier for her. But life was better before the tsunami, she says.
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“I tell my children now, that we used to have a very happy life. We had very little money but we were a joyful family before the wave destroyed us,” says Anjamma. Her husband is still a fisherman but they can barely make ends meet. “We struggle to have two meals a day. The house is almost falling apart and every time it rains, it gets flooded.”
The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), India’s apex body for disaster management headed by the Prime Minister was set up in 2005, after the tsunami. Many of its guidelines were framed from the experience of relief and rehabilitation in Nagapattinam, says Annie George who worked for 15 years in Nagapattinam’s tsunami affected community as the CEO of the NGO Coordination and Resource Centre (NCRC).
Functioning out of the Nagapattinam district collectorate, NCRC comprised two NGOs (Sneha and the South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies), the district administration and the United National Development Project (UNDP). “After the tsunami, every step was trial and error but we have learnt from that to have a disaster management protocol now,” says George. “There were a lot of discussions that happened in Chennai and Delhi on the experience in Nagapattinam over what the final policy should look like. For instance, NDMA has directives on coordination mechanisms (between government and community) based on learnings from Nagapattinam and the 1994 cyclone in Orissa.” Nagapattinam had village information centres where people could directly speak to government agencies.
After the tsunami, there was no shortage of help; 400 NGOs worked on relief and 200 on rehabilitation.The challenge was to reach out to the last person in the line. “We had to ensure that the most visible didn’t get the lion’s share of help and the least visible didn’t lose out,” says George. “There was a challenge in trying to understand the nuances of rehabilitation. When agriculture was affected, it affected those practising agriculture in different ways.”
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Trying to move on
A little over 300km away, in Chennai, tsunami affected families were relocated to areas in the suburbs of the city. Tamil Nadu constructed 11,000 tenements in Chennai of which 7,000 were built with funding from the World Bank under the Emergency Tsunami Reconstruction project.
One such area is Kannagi Nagar, on the outskirts of southern Chennai, where more than 15,000 families now live . Each of these families here is crammed inside a 150 sq foot house. Some have rented adjacent homes by paying a fee to the government.
Ravi Kumar, an auto driver, was playing cards on the beach in Santhome in Chennai with his friends, when the tsunami struck. Part of the 1,000-odd families in Thideer Nagar, he and everyone else rushed towards the St Thomas Cathedral Basilica for shelter. A wooden pole on these footsteps is believed to have been erected by Thomas the Apostle. No one died on account of the monster wave.
Now, 20 years later,Kumar and others have been moved to Kannagi Nagar. “From the time we came here until now, for the last 20 years, we have to struggle for everything,” says Kumar.
“We were brought in a lorry like garbage and dumped here,” says K Sheela, another resident who was relocated to Kannagi Nagar. “We were better off there where everyone had jobs, a good house and a healthy life.”
When they moved in, back in February 2005, there was no water or electricity. Hundreds protested. They did eventually get these facilities, but the state is now demanding maintenance arrears, failing which, they have threatened to not transfer the houses in the names of the beneficiaries.The maintenance fee has gone up from ₹50 a month in 2005 to ₹250 from 2015. “This is a uniform maintenance charge considering the escalation in cost of materials and other charges. It was after much deliberation that this was decided,” said a state government official who asked not to be named.
This increase has only added to the burden of families that are already vulnerable without consulting them, says Vanessa Peter, founder, Information and Resource Centre for Deprived Urban Communities. “The government has to issue these families a sale deed on priority and address infrastructure issues in various housing programmes,” Peter adds. It is such apathy that is believed to have driven people living in displacement homes in Tsunami Quarters in Tondiarpet, in the northern part of Chennai, to sell their kidneys for survival — an issue that came to light in 2007 resulting in hospitals being blacklisted and facilitators being arrested.
It was the community that saved her from similar desperate measures stemming from poverty, says A Anitha, in Kannagi Nagar. She was a middle-schooler when the tsunami struck. She and her disabled mother survived. Now with two children of her own (her mother having passed away a decade ago), Anitha credits her neighbours and NGOs for her well-being. She works with the civic body to go door-to-door collecting data on families.
Survivors have formed tightly knit communities that look out for each other, and created community leaders. In Nagapattinam, at the Annai Sathya Government Children’s Home,where around 100 children who lost either one or both their parents in the tsunami were housed, a reunion on December 22 brought together survivors and rescue workers including Radhakrishnan .
“In general, all disasters help us in re-calibrating, and the tsunami specifically institutionalised the NDMA and state and district level disaster management agencies. If a tsunami were to happen now, there is sufficient time to warn people through early warning systems, and better infrastructure for people to escape from the coast to the inland, Radhakrishnan says. “In 2004, in Nagapattinam and Myladudurai, there were just not enough connecting roads for people to escape.”
