Aid not reaching quake victims

Rescuers picking through the rubble of India's worst earthquake found a small boy trapped alive today as hopes faded in the hunt for more survivors.

Three days after the quake, many smaller towns and villages struggled to cope after the disaster without help from the outside.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee arrived in the ancient town of Bhuj in Gujarat state in western India, which bore the brunt of Friday's quake, and complained that villages in the region were not getting necessary help fast enough.

"Relief work needs to be speeded up," he told reporters. "The government is surveying the villages. There is a lack of relief work in the villages." The disaster has killed an estimated 20,000 people.

The World Bank said it would immediately release $300 million for quake relief.

Vajpayee announced federal aid of $107.6 million for Gujarat.

Rescue teams from India and abroad raced against time to clear bodies in the major centres such as Bhuj and Gujarat's main city Ahmedabad. Fear of collapsing buildings, fresh tremors and disease tracked their every move.

Rescue workers in Bhuj said a small boy had been found alive but they feared they would have to amputate a limb to get him out.

Mike Thomas, one of a British rescue team, said that the boy, who was three or four years old, was stuck and in order to get him out they would have to amputate a limb. The boy's brother was already dead and his mother died beside him soon after rescuers arrived.

In New Delhi, people thronged a Red Cross building to donate blood for those injured in the quake, which the U.S. Geological Survey put at 7.9 on the Richter scale.

Earlier, soldiers in Bhuj dug Cham Paten Seth, 90, from the rubble. She had survived because her head was protected by an old sewing machine. She had been calling out and Sikh soldiers used their hands and crowbars to dig her out.

As she emerged, asking for water, she said that she had heard the voices of two more people alive under the rubble.

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