India Cyclone Death Toll at 9,573

By GOPAL DAS Associated Press Writer

PARADWIP, India (AP) _ With death and destruction strewn across the cyclone-ravaged Indian state of Orissa, a newborn baby brought a glimpse of new life to a group of lepers abandoned in a building in this eastern sea port.

Two weeks after the cyclone tore through the eastern state, the death toll Wednesday stood at 9,573 people. Relief workers were still cremating dead bodies and decomposing carcasses of hundreds of thousands of cows, goats and donkeys. Many roads were still under water, and the government had been unable to reach many places where people remained without food, potable water or medicine.

For some 60 families of leprosy patients gathered in a concrete building Wednesday, the tiny unnamed infant was a bittersweet sign that life goes on. ``God has sent a new life to earth after taking so many,'' said Bonomalli Naik, one of the male leprosy patients. When the baby's mother, 39-year-old Kanak Rana, went into labor Tuesday, there were no doctors. Another leper who had lost three fingers to the debilitating disease played midwife. ``I have no money to buy baby food for my daughter. Nor do I have a drop of clean water to give her,'' said Rana, who does not have leprosy.

Rana was unable to breast-feed her daughter, she said, because she has been living on watery gruel since the Oct. 29 cyclone. She also has two other children to care for and was mourning her husband, a leper killed in the cyclone.

The day-old baby lay on the cold concrete floor, wrapped in a dirty rag. A cold wind blew through the window, and the baby shivered, while flies landed on her face. Rana's husband, Prafulla, had brought his pregnant wife and two sons, ages 6 and 2, to the safety of the brick-and-cement building in his bicycle rickshaw as the cyclone approached from the Bay of Bengal. He went back to the leper colony to gather his other meager belongings, but never returned. His body was found along with the wrecked rickshaw three days later in swamps near the family's home. Government officials and aid workers were nowhere in sight, although banners of several Indian and international aid organizations fluttered across the port city. Rana's 2-year-old son, Pavitra, picked up scraps of rice from the floor. ``The baby is very quiet. And we don't know whether she will survive the ordeal,'' said Daitri Swain, an old man among the lepers.

In the nearby town of Cuttack, 350 other poor people huddled in the Leprosy Home and Hospital, without food or water. Superintendent D.S. Acharya said the hospital's residents were moved to three rooms that were not damaged by the storm. As prices of food grains skyrocketed in Orissa, suppliers refused to bring supplies to the center, Acharya said. However, he said he managed to get 220 pounds of rice. ``We have exhausted the hospital's emergency fund and our personal resources as well,'' he said. ``Unless we get relief and our regular grants from the government, we have no other alternative but to starve.''