Indians living in the Washington DC area have already raised over two million dollars for the Tsunami victims and have also established links with 1000 villages in south India for distribution of relief monies.

Grouping themselves under the banner ?Association for India?s Development?, the expatriates have already raised around two million dollars for the victims. They have established volunteer links with about 1000 villages over the course of their everyday efforts. Besides the association has set up its office in Chennai to collect information of what?s needed, especially in Tamil Nadu and to start planning reconstruction in the state which faced the maximum brunt of the killer waves. According to the expatriates, keeping in mind the magnitude of the devastation caused it might take three to four years for carrying out the relief work in the tsunami affected areas in India. But, they say they will remain committed to the relief work till the very end. Mohan Bhagat a physics professor at the University of Maryland and also a member of the board of directors for the association for India?s development (AID) has been helping to coordinate the fund raising efforts in Washington. He told ANI: ?On December 26th by 1 o clock it became clear that we must do something. Immediately we got together a website set up and within an hour or so we tried to establish contact with India. That took a few hours for obvious reasons. By the evening we were able to make contact with a professor at IIT madras. He immediately informed me that they were going out in the field trying to establish what was needed, how much we can do, so it was almost an immediate response.?

About the funds collected so far for the purpose Prof Bhagat said ?Once our website was announced donations began coming in. in less than two weeks we have crossed two million dollars and this is all by word of mouth?

He added ?We are concentrating on perhaps 50-80 villages. Typically there is something like 100 families in a village. So something like 5000 families will be our focus for a while. And the idea is again, there are too many boats, we don?t have the resources, so our groups are trying to find co-operatives, so we can find a few boats and that will again set an example.?