New Delhi

Relief centres in India have been inundated with people in need of food and aid. Credit: G. OSAN/AP

India's government and scientific establishment have been heavily criticized for failing to provide warning of a tsunami that drowned at least 12,000 people on the nation's eastern coast.

Newspapers and opposition spokesmen have asked why a country with India's scientific resources couldn't better prepare for such an event. Ministers immediately pledged up to US$29 million to build a tsunami-monitoring system, and promised to seek more cooperation with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii.

“This is not a knee-jerk reaction. We are very serious,” science and technology secretary Valangiman Ramamurthi told Nature. “We are going to have a brain-storming meeting this month to decide how we should proceed and we have invited experts from the United States,” he said. In response to criticism, he added: “We cannot join a Pacific network as India is not in that region. And you do not make heavy investment to warn against something that happens once in a century.”

The ocean development secretary, Harsh Gupta, told a press conference in New Delhi that there was no record of a tsunami ever hitting the Indian coastline, even as other government ministers acknowledged such events in 1833 and 1883.

“No government thought of it,” says science minister Kapil Sibal. “The last recorded tsunami was in 1883. It was not in the horizon of our thoughts.” India now plans to install a network of 10 to 12 seafloor pressure sensors to be imported from the United States, as well as several floating sensors on ocean buoys, linked to an Indian geostationary satellite.

Critics say that the tragedy exposed a major weakness in the current system, which authorizes only the Indian Meteorological Department to put out hazard alerts. “Data were pouring into our lab but we cannot issue alerts even if we can analyse the data for tsunami potential,” says one researcher at the National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad.

They also want to know why the Indian air force, whose base in Car Nicobar Island was submerged by tides an hour before the waves hit the mainland, failed to provide any public warning.

The tsunami spared India's main rocket launch site at Sriharikota Island, 80 kilometres north of Chennai. But it damaged cooling water pumps at a nuclear power station at Kalpakkam, leaving staff with very little time to shut down the plant safely. “The tsunami factor was not taken into account,” says Anil Kakodkar, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. “From now on, it will be factored in.”