The discrepancy may reflect the difficulties involved in counting the dead in the Indian Ocean islands, where whole villages were swept out to sea and most of the bodies will never be found.

But it may also reflect an embarrassing and sensitive fact for the Indian government, some experts say. Many of the victims were illegal settlers on islands supposedly reserved for indigenous tribes.

"Some of the non-tribal people were living here illegally," said local member of parliament Manoranjan Bhakta. "Many of them were affected because they were living on or near the shore. Until and unless we get claims from the next of kin we won't know."

Bhakta, who belongs to India's ruling Congress party and is a senior member of a government panel coordinating relief in the Andamans, estimates at least 10,000 people died there.

Samir Acharya, a leading tribal expert, says the toll could be higher still.

"I have had very close contacts with the tribal captains in the southern group for the past 10 years at least, and I sat down with them and went through the figures village by village," he said.

"It is my educated guess that deaths may be much higher than is being reported. I would say the death toll would be 12,000 or so."

A tribal leader and chief medical officer on Car Nicobar, Anwar Musa, says 3,500 to 4,000 people died on that island alone. The government puts it at just 1,123 dead or missing.

AVOID SCRUTINY

Local policemen and aid workers gave similar estimates while military officers admitted the Car Nicobar death toll did not include settlers.

"Why is the government lying?" asked one policeman who spent 16 days on Car Nicobar. "We saw at least 1,000 bodies in our area of operation which was limited to one part of the island."

This is not just a debate about numbers, but about people whose deaths may never go recorded or acknowledged. It is also a reminder of the underlying tensions between tribal groups and illegal settlers in the southern Nicobar islands.

Many labourers have been brought to islands by government contractors to carry out public works projects. Some stayed on illegally, attracted by land and opportunity, often with the connivance of local officials.

Bhakta says the government has tried to pin down the death toll "meticulously" and Acharya recognises how difficult it was to count the dead when there were bodies rotting on the shore or floating in the waters around many of islands.

Others suspect the Indian government was keen to play down the numbers, to avoid too close a scrutiny of its rule on the remote archipelago, and have too many outsiders poking around.

"They want to downplay it, say it is not a big thing," said Sudipta Singh of the Church of North India, the main Anglican church of the mainly Christian Nicobarese. "They don't care."

Lieutenant-General Aditya Singh, who commands the military on the islands and was drafted in to the relief effort, dismissed talk of a high death toll.