Chennai -- In the small fishing village of Kasimedu, a group of 20 men are trying to pull a cutter washed onto land by Sunday's tsunami back into the water. Several fisherman have already returned to the sea with their nets. This year's catch was bad, they explain. They can't afford to take any more time off.

"Indians are used to natural catastrophes," a police officer patrolling the beach with colleagues explained. "Every year we have at least one, two or three cyclones."

About 60 kilometers south, one of the two reactors at the Madras Nuclear Power Station is still turned off. The tsunami destroyed one of the protective walls around the plant. And, when the salt water from the sea mixed with fresh water used to cool the reactor, the cooling system faltered and the reactor's emergency shut down system kicked in. Soon though, it will be functioning again, officials here say. Just how that's supposed to happen is a different question altogether. The quarters that housed security guards here are now rubble. The two churches on the complex are mere ruins. And 60 people died in this small community -- including plant employees.

Yet despite the surrounding chaos and the destruction of the wall, the government insists the plant is in operating order and that its "basic systems are functioning securely" with no danger of any meltdown. But consider this: India has no independent organization that provides oversight over nuclear power plants or can provide spontaneous safety checks.

Anil Kakodar of the Department of Energy has said that all Indian nuclear plants are earthquake and cyclone-proof. Of course, no one thought about testing them against 20-meter-high waves. Before systems get back online, all security precautions will be taken, officials said, including doing a crash course on the possible glitches a tsunami can cause.

Counting the survivors

But while some parts of Madras and Chennai may be returning to business as usual, relief operations here demonstrate how far life is from normal on India's atolls. Here, the brunt of the tidal wave's impact hit and everyone feels it. Chennai has become the main hub for relief operations. From here, aid supplies are delivered to the atolls -- the Andaman and Nicobar islands in the Gulf of Bengal. Survivors plucked from the islands have been brought here to sit out the crisis in refugee camps until the situation on the atolls gets back under control.

The southern-most island, Grand Nicobar, is located about 200 kilometers from the epicenter of Sunday's undersea earthquake, and the killer wave destroyed almost everything there. Most of the 527 islands, of which only 36 are inhabited, hardly rise above sea level and had no way of resisting the massive flooding.

The situation is so bleak on the islands that the dead aren't even being counted anymore. Instead, authorities are counting the living who come to the first aid stations in search of food and water. They figure in the end, if they subtract the difference between the registered population and the survivors, they'll arrive at the right number.

But there's a serious flaw in that methodology: a half a week after the catastrophe, many parts of the islands are still completely cut off from the outside world. Nobody knows just how hard they've been hit or how many survivors are now unable to get to refugee camps.

Officials in Port Blair, the capital city of the Andamans, have lost contact with several islands that are home to six threatened aboriginal tribes that have existed since the Stone Age. The two smallest tribes have only 100 members each and Indian ethnologists fear the tsunami may have sealed their downfall.

On Wednesday, Sonia Gandhi, widow of assassinated former Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi and president of the Congress Party, landed in Chennai to asses the situation. The previous day she visited the Andamans. In the slum suburb of Srinivasapura, angry local fishermen circled her convoy. These men feel that the government has abandoned them and the air reaked of riot.