With phones down, boat links cut and the number of missing people dwarfing the death toll, tsunami survivors on Andaman and Nicobar Islands have only one hope for tracing relatives -- the radio.

　　Airwaves in the remote islands are jammed as hundreds of anxious islanders have flocked to the office of state-run All India Radio with handwritten questions about the fate of their loved ones, many of which are still cut off from the world after the Dec. 26 tsunami.

　　"I am very concerned about you, I promise you, I will take the first boat and fetch you," reads a message from schoolboy P. Uday Bhanu to his father who was in the Hut Bay islet in the south of the archipelago when disaster struck.

　　Another went out from a Catholic priest, listing the names of each of his family members on Car Nicobar island, which took the brunt of the waves, and urging them to somehow get out and reach Port Blair, the island's capital.

　　Nine days after the tsunami, there is still no clear number for the number of the people who have died on this remote cluster of more than 550 islands, of which only three dozen are inhabited.

　　Almost all the islands can only be reached by sea, but the giant waves destroyed most jetties, leaving many people stranded.

　　Rescue teams have so far found 900 bodies in the rubble of buildings, in the thick forests and in fissures in the ground. But 5,700 people are listed as "missing".

　　"Even in normal circumstances, the radio is critical to islanders to know about ship movements, weather, etc," said K.D Shukla, a programme officer at All India Radio. "But today it is the lifeline, the only link to the outlying islands."

　　Some people looking for missing relatives have got lucky.

　　Shukla recalls a call he took one night last week from a man in Port Blair trying to reach his sister who he thought was in Car Nicobar island when the tsunami struck.

　　Fifteen minutes after the message was read out over the radio, the sister rang up the station saying she was safe and in the interior of Andaman island. "We promptly went back on the air and relayed her message to the brother."