Colombo, Sri Lanka ? Bureaucratic bungling has blocked food and medicine from reaching 70 percent of Sri Lankans left destitute by the tsunami, a government official said Wednesday, while nine survivors of the disaster were found deep in a jungle on a remote Indian island.

Thilak Ranavirajah, chief of Sri Lanka’s presidential task force coordinating relief, said bureaucratic incompetence and ignorance had considerably slowed aid delivery. He estimated relief had reached only 30 percent of those who need it in the second hardest-hit nation, after Indonesia.

On India’s remote Campbell Bay island, police searching for bodies found nine tsunami survivors deep in a jungle. They had spent 38 days wandering across flattened villages, eating coconuts and hunting boars to survive and making fires by rubbing sticks together.

The nine people belong to the Nicobarese tribe and include five men, two women and two teenage girls, Inspector Shaukat Hussain told The Associated Press by telephone from Campbell Bay, the only town in Great Nicobar, India’s southernmost island.

Two of the survivors were severely dehydrated and were hospitalized. The other seven were sent to a relief camp.

In the Sri Lankan capital, hundreds of people protested outside the U.N. World Food Program office Wednesday, complaining they had not received food rations. It was not the first sign of trouble with Sri Lanka’s aid effort. On Tuesday, the government began investigating complaints that food aid intended for tsunami victims had disappeared and some of the homeless living in camps were being fed rotten supplies.

The cumulative death toll from 11 nations stood at between 158,000 and 178,000 Wednesday, with an another 142,000 people estimated missing.

World leaders are trying to further coordinate the global aid effort, with former President Clinton appointed Tuesday to take over as the U.N. point man for post-tsunami reconstruction.