Rescue workers Tuesday miraculously pulled three people from the rubble 100 hours after western India's devastating earthquake, as horror and anger mounted over the scale of the disaster.
Kunvarben, a 75-year-old grandmother, was finally freed from her ordeal at 2:15 pm (0845 GMT) following a three-hour rescue operation by a Russian team in Bachao township of Gujarat state.
Several hours earlier, emergency workers in Gujarat's commercial capital Ahmedabad pulled a mother and her one-year-old son from the rubble of a four-storey apartment block.
The rescues were the only positive news on a day when India was digesting fresh estimates of a final death toll as high as 100,000 from the quake, measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale, that hit Gujarat on Friday morning.
The sudden leap from 20,000 was made late Monday by Defence Minister George Fernandes, who identified shoddy building standards as the fatal element underlying the level of destruction.
"If you look at the loss of human life then one is looking at perhaps 100,000 people at the moment," Fernandes told the BBC in an interview.
"The number of injured would run to about twice that number if not more," the minister added.
Fernandes said legislation brought in to improve building standards had been ignored, with disastrous consequences.
If the latest estimates prove to be accurate, the Gujarat disaster will go down as one of the most destructive quakes of modern times.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was more circumspect about the death toll.
"That is his estimate," Vajpayee said of the figure put about by Fernandes.
"Until all the bodies which are trapped below the debris are recovered, a precise figure cannot be given."
Gujarat Home Minister Haren Pandya stood by his state government's estimate of between 15,000 and 20,000 dead.
"We are not deliberately putting out a lower figure nor do we want to give an exaggerated figure," Pandya said.
"Our assessment is based on the body count, the number of likely missing people, information from the hospitals and estimates of people trapped under the debris."
Despite Tuesday's warming survivor stories, rescue workers said their searches were proving increasingly fruitless, and in many places bulldozers were being called in to uncover the rotting corpses.
The funeral pyres have been burning all over Gujarat for the past three days, and extra firewood was being shipped in from other states to keep them fuelled.
Pandya and police officials confirmed increasing reports of looting, both of jewellery and other personal effects from bodies, as well as from shops and small businesses.
"This is emerging as a concern for all the survivors," Pandya said. "We are tightening security all over the place, as well as increasing patrols on the highways."
Gujarat police chief C.P. Singh also noted disturbing reports of groups of hungry and desperate villagers waylaying relief trucks in remote areas.
Among the foreign relief supplies were tents and blankets carried by a Pakistan Air Force C-130 aircraft, which arrived in Ahmedabad following days stuck on the tarmac in Islamabad.
The plane's belated arrival came after India contradicted claims by Pakistani military ruler General Pervez Musharraf that New Delhi had rejected the assistance.
As grief over the disaster turned to anger, public resentment was sharply focused on the civil authorities and real estate developers who had bypassed guidelines on earthquake protection.
"No inquiry is necessary to establish that the loss would have been far less if civil authorities had done their duty and unscrupulous builders had been forced to curb their greed," said the Calcutta-based Statesman newspaper.
"There has obviously been an attempt to conserve costs at the expense of safety," the paper said. "Most buildings were death traps before people moved into them."
The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), estimated that in the next two weeks Gujarat would face a slowdown in industrial production amounting to roughly 10 billion rupees (217 million dollars).
"A manpower crisis is staring everyone in the face as there has been a large-scale migration of labour from Gujrati towns and cities badly hit by the earthquake," said CII deputy director S. Sen.
Gujarat, which is in an earthquake-prone zone, has a population of around 42 million and is one of India's most prosperous and industrialized states -- AHMEDABAD, India (AFP)
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