PUSHPA sat peeling carrots outside the tent in which she has lived with her three young children since her home and her husband were swept away by the Boxing Day tsunami.

“We know your people helped us with money,” she told The Times. “So what has our Government done with it? The monsoon will be here soon and still we have no home.”

Pushpa, 25, from the Sri Lankan town of Galle, is not alone in her bewilderment. Almost five months after the disaster and the start of the biggest emergency fundraising operation in history, hundreds of thousands of people across the tsunami-ravaged countries of South Asia are still living in temporary camps.

In most of the affected countries, rebuilding work has hardly begun. Earlier this week the new head of reconstruction in Aceh, Indonesia, pronounced himself “shocked” at the lack of progress in the shattered Indonesian province.

The British people gave £340 million. Worldwide more than £4.7 billion was pledged in an unprecedented display of generosity. But not all those pledges have been kept, and the disbursement of those funds that have materialised has been choked by the usual pitfalls of developing countries — red tape, internal conflict, political disputes, incompetence and corruption.

The UN’s relief fund has, to date, received £1.4 billion in commitments or actual cash of the £3.5 billion pledged.

Jan Egeland, the UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator, said that the immediate emergency was over but the challenge now was “in reallocating funds from overfunded relief projects to underfunded reconstruction programmes. Getting all local, national and international actors to agree on a coherent development effort is going to be even harder than meeting the emergency needs.”

In Aceh the tsunami left 168,000 dead and almost 600,000 homeless, of whom an estimated 188,000 are still living in camps, 109,000 with friends and relatives and 70,000 in rough, wooden, government shelters.

The camps are grim, with tents that leak in the rain and become ovens in the sun. The displaced — mostly jobless — receive 26lb 8oz of rice and 6fl oz of cooking oil a month, and must buy anything more themselves.

“It’s shocking — very limited things have been done for the poor people,” said Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, head of the newly formed Aceh Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency. “There are no roads being built, there are no bridges being built, there are no harbours being built. When it comes to reconstruction, zero.”

One problem is that it has taken the Government four months to set up his agency, and it will not begin dispensing the £325 million earmarked by the Government for rebuilding until September.

The tsunami also killed many of Aceh’s civil servants and administrators. Strict controls have been imposed on foreign aid workers. Conflict between the Indonesian military and the guerrillas of the Free Aceh Movement has further hampered aid distribution.

Vital reconstruction projects are only just getting off the ground. On Sunday the US signed a deal to spend £130 million rebuilding the road that runs 155 miles down the west coast of Sumatra.

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