Prime Minister Manmohan Singh makes an aerial survey of the flood-affected areas of Uttarakhand on Wednesday. (PTI)

New Delhi, June 19: The Centre today was still assessing the magnitude of the loss in the floods since June 16 in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.

Thousands of inhabitants and pilgrims are yet to be reached even as rescuers began facing crippling shortages of fuel that have hampered their movement.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA chairperson took an aerial survey of Uttarakhand and announced Rs 1,000 crore for the state for disaster relief in addition to ex-gratia amounts of Rs 2 lakh each to the families of those who have been killed and Rs 50,000 each to those who have been injured.

But no official assessment as yet has been possible of the numbers of people who are affected, save that the figure runs to more than 70,000.

“What we saw today was most distressing…. While the most recent estimates put the death toll at 102, it is feared that the loss of lives could eventually be much higher. The priority for the authorities at the moment is to rescue the stranded and provide urgently needed succour to those most in need of it,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a statement. Army and air force soldiers involved in relief and rescue admitted that the Gourikund-Kedarnath track, usually crowded by pilgrims in this season on a 14-kilometre trek on foot or on mule-back to and from the Kedarnath temple, “has all but vanished”. An Indian Air Force helipad in Kedarnath was under several layers of mud and army engineers were airdropped to the pilgrim town to reconstruct a temporary landing zone for helicopters.

On Monday, in a preliminary estimate given to the air force, the civil administration had assessed there could be as many as 30,000 people on the road to Kedarnath.

The Kedarnath temple would remain closed to devotees “till further announcement”, the chief of the committee that runs the pilgrim site said today, though the rain-triggered havoc appeared to have spared the shrine.

Ganesh Godyal, chairman of the Badrinath-Kedarnath temple committee, said authorities would be busy clearing the compound of debris, restoring the structure and rebuilding resting places and guesthouses ravaged by the flash flood.

The IAF and the army have deployed between them more than 25 helicopters operating out of Jolly Grant (near Dehradun), Bareilly and Pantnagar. But aircrew, who have returned from sorties, have said they are unwilling to use the larger Mi-17 and Mi-17V5 helicopters — each of which can ferry up to 15 persons — “because the hillsides were so loose from the rains that the downwash from the rotorblades of the choppers could trigger landslips”.

The smaller Dhruv Advanced Light Helicopters were being used mostly and over terrain in which they cannot yet land in Uttarakhand.

But helipads being used in the plains, such as Jolly Grant, do not have enough fuel pre-positioned for so many helicopters and this has forced the IAF to ration the number of sorties. Between June 16 and June 18 the IAF had flown 92 sorties and had evacuated 580 civilians.

In New Delhi, defence minister A.K. Antony, home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde and cabinet secretary Ajit Kumar Seth were co-ordinating relief and rescue operations. Antony was briefed by the chiefs of the army and the air force and by the Military Operations Directorate.

The ministry of external affairs announced it was cancelling batches two to 10 of the annual Kailash Mansoravar yatra to Tibet.