Baby girl becomes tsunami symbol

A wide-eyed baby stares at you from newspaper pages. 'Have you seen this girl?' asks the blurb.

Though just another of those missing-in-Tsunami insertions, this baby, about an year-old, has become a symbol of the tsunami disaster in Andaman and Nicobar islands.

A week after her picture taken by British freelance photographer, T Wood, was published in London dailies, the Daily Express has launched a campaign for her.

"After her innocent face appeared in London dailies, including ours, we started a campaign for her. But after coming to Port Blair, we are not being able to locate her," says Cyril Dixon, a Daily Express photographer, who is in India with a reporter colleague to find the baby.

After scouring a large number of relief camps past three days, they finally put in an insertion in a local daily.

The baby's picture appeared alongside the photograph of a teacher couple, B Srinivas Rao and Padmawathi and their two sons Yogesh and Dipu, who are untraceable from Nirman Nagar area of Katchal Island of Nicobar.

The operational head of the Integrated Relief Command General B S Thakur puts the figure of missing people in the December 26 calamity at 5,592.

Almost every household in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have grim stories to narrate.

Newly wed engineer V Harisudhan Nair and his doctor wife Smriti of Diglipur Islan in the Andaman district have called
off their wedding reception.

"When the islands have suffered such a massive destruction, where is the question of celebration?" they ask.