THE THIRD "R".(The Talk of the Town)

The South Indian fishing village of Komitichavadi, about seventy-five miles south of Chennai, the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, is situated on a stretch of coast that was particularly hard hit by the tsunami. In the neighboring hamlets, fifty-nine people, mostly babies and the elderly, were killed. Hundreds were injured, and many are missing. In Komitichavadi, however, not a single person died; everyone has been accounted for.

The villagers owe their good fortune to the quick thinking of Govind, the headman of the local panchayat, a traditional village council of a kind that exists all over rural India. On the morning of the tsunami, Govind received a call on his cell phone from his wife. She was in Chennai, where she had felt tremors from the earthquake off Indonesia, a thousand miles away. Soon, Govind noticed the ocean rising, and his wife called again. The waters were flooding the beach promenade in Chennai, she said, and people were being swept away; she begged her husband to escape. Instead, Govind rushed to the ocean, where children were playing and fishermen were sorting through their catch. He ran along the beach, waving his arms in the air, warning everyone to flee. A few minutes later, the water rushed in. "Everyone just ran," Govind said. "They didn't even have time to save their nets. They just ran up the hill to the temple and sat and waited."

Though no one died, the village was destroyed. Fifteen homes along the waterfront were demolished. More than a hundred boats were lost; fishing nets, some worth almost as much as the boats, were damaged or lost. The village prawn farm, where forty people were employed and a new building had just been constructed, has been shut down. January is usually a big month for fishermen: they can earn as much as ten thousand rupees (more than two hundred and twenty dollars) a week. Now those earnings, as well as those for the coming months, are lost.

People involved in crisis management like to refer to "the three 'R's": rescue, relief, and rehabilitation. The last stage is in many ways the most important, as well as the most expensive and time-consuming--and therefore the most widely ignored. For now, the aid is flowing in; people seem resigned to living off charity for a few months. But once that dries up it's anyone's guess what the villagers of South India are going to do to get by.

On a sunny afternoon ten days after the tsunami, Govind, who is forty-seven, sat in his living room, the green walls decorated with portraits of deities, and spoke about the panchayat's relief work. The sea was visible through his front door; it was calm, but the beach was deserted. There were no boats or ships on the ...