NAGARANI never dreamt that she would be married at 16. That was before the Boxing Day tsunami washed away her family’s home and left her, her widowed mother and younger sisters with nowhere to live but a relief camp packed with other homeless villagers.

First came the looks from the older men, then the visits to propose marriage. Then a neighbour threatened to kidnap her and tried to snatch her on her way to market. Her mother had had enough.

“You must marry,” she told Nagarani. “How long can I look after a pretty girl like you? Please see it my way — I only want you to be safe.”

Nagarani had little choice. Nor was she the first teenage girl in the village in this position. “We call them the tsunami marriages,” she said with a shrug. “You can’t see any 16-year-old girls here any more — only 16-year-old wives.”

In the months since the tsunami struck, teenage girls along the length of India’s battered Tamil Nadu coast have been dragooned into marriage.

Some are married off by parents terrified of their honour being compromised in the crowded relief camps; some because their parents can no longer afford to look after them. The tsunami killed four women for every man. The men were stronger swimmers, and the women were slowed as they tried to rescue children. There is now a dangerous gender imbalance in many villages.

In 16-year-old Selvanakayi’s village, 45 people were killed by the wave, all but three of them female. Her first cousin asked for her hand after the tsunami killed his grandmother, the only female member of his household. “They wanted him to marry so there would be a woman in the house,” Selvanakayi said. “I was shocked when they came and told me. I refused but my mother started trying to convince me that they needed me there. In the end I had no choice, so I thought ‘better the devil you know’.”

Both families had another good reason for marrying off their daughters; an incentive from the state government. After the tsunami, it offered a wedding package worth 40,000 rupees (£507) to every bride from the stricken area. It was intended for legal brides only — over the age of 18 — but parents of under-age girls, who had also lost everything in the tsunami, saw the chance to cash in.

Amalah, 16, said: “My parents lost all their documents along with the house so when they asked for proof of my age, we didn’t have any.” She was married off to a first cousin two months after the tsunami. “So my schoolteacher vouched for me and told them I was 18. Nobody questioned it.”

She never returned to school. She abandoned her dream of becoming the first member of her family to get a skilled job. “If I studied a lot, imagine what I could be doing. I could have been doing what you do,” she said, nodding towards the journalist taking down her story. “That makes me sad.”

Priya, 15, was married off to a 19-year-old neighbour in January. He had pursued her for months, but before the tsunami she had no time for him. Then, in the forced proximity of the camp, he entered her room when her mother was gone and pressured her into sex, she says. After that, it was not for her to say “no”.

The village held a wedding, she was given some jewellery and sent to live with her young husband, who quickly tired of her. “I think the village elders took the [government] money,” she said. “We never saw it.”

No one knows how many underage weddings there have been. But of the 150 weddings in her village since the tsunami, Nagarani reckons that at least 20 have involved underage girls. “It is all my friends, all my cousins,” she said, pointing around the camp to the many slender young girls in saris, the mark of a married woman.

“In the tsunami, so many people lost their lives, so now everyone is desperate for babies to be born,” Nagarani added. “Soon we will be mothers and then all the things we ever wanted will be forgotten.”

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