OVERCOME by a black depression, Parameswari Bose struggled to carry on after losing her four children and her home to the Boxing Day tsunami.

“What did I do to lose my children?” she wept. “Why could it not have been me who was washed away? I keep straining to hear their voices, but hear nothing.”

Like so many of the bereaved mothers of Nagapattinam, the worst-affected town in the tsunami-struck state of Tamil Nadu, she had undergone sterilisation as part of a government-sponsored family planning scheme aimed at halting India’s soaring population growth. It was impossible for her to bear more children.

Their plight attracted the attention of Nirmala Palanisamy, a nurse who had volunteered to counsel women and children traumatised by the tsunami. In the hope of alleviating their grief, the nurse explained how their sterilisation could be reversed through surgery, if only they could raise the estimated cost of 20,000 rupees (£240).

This week Mrs Palanisamy brought them unexpected joy with news that the Indian Government had agreed to pay the full cost of the operation, an unprecedented offer in a country of more than a billion people. “I told the group it was possible for them to have children again,” Mrs Palanisamy said. She explained that the sterilisation in which their Fallopian tubes had been severed or tied could be reversed. With all of them under 35, there was no good reason why they could not then conceive naturally.

Women have flocked to the nurse’s surgery, despite being told that the operation has a success rate of only 60 per cent.

Of the 40,000 affected families in Nagapattinam, almost all the menfolk earn their living by fishing. With their husbands away at sea, the women were almost all full-time mothers. More than 2,500 children were lost here, leaving mothers not just guilty and grief-stricken but without the distraction of their daily tasks of caring for their children.

As excitement spreads among the sterilised bereaved at the thought of conceiving again, one group of women are left out in the cold: those at the end of their child-bearing lives. The realisation that younger women can have children again while they cannot may be a shock almost as shattering as their first loss.

One nurse shuddered as she recounted the wails of a 40-year-old woman receiving compensation for her lost son. “We have to treat them with more care and compassion than newborn babies,” she said.

Official financial assistance came too late for Parameswari. Although her grief-stricken husband squandered most of their tsunami compensation payment on alcohol, she raised enough to pay for treatment at a private hospital.

Now she waits for nature to take its course.

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