KUMBAKONAM, July 16: Nearly 80 children were burnt to death on Friday when a fire raged through a primary school in India's southern Tamil Nadu state, officials said.

"Seventy-seven bodies have been recovered," senior police official S. Natarajan told AFP from the temple town of Kumbakonam where the blaze broke out at around 11:00am (1030am PST).

Thirty-four other children were severely injured in the fire and were admitted to hospital in Kumbakonam, 350 kilometres from Madras, capital of Tamil Nadu, Natarajani said.

Sobbing parents waited outside a hospital where the bodies of children aged six to 13 years were brought from in the gutted Saraswati Primary School, witnesses said. Television footage showed heaps of bodies, some locked in embrace.

Fire fighters said the victims stood no chance of survival as the building's third floor thatched roof collapsed on them. "They were surrounded by fire from all sides. They had no hope from the moment the fire started," a fireman told television stations.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha Jayram, who rushed to the site, ordered a major probe into the deadly inferno and called for criminal action against the school management, saying it had not adhered to basic fire safety norms.

She also suspended the district education officer on charges of "dereliction of duty" and said the survivors must be treated at state expense. India's federal parliament, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Abdul Kalam expressed anguish over the tragedy and sent condolences to the victim's parents.

Witnesses in the tiny town spoke of chaos outside the smouldering school. "Parents are howling outside the building, unable to recognize their little ones, as the bodies are being loaded into ambulances," said a housewife living next door to the school.

The primary school was housed on the third-storey thatched-roof terrace of the Krishna Girls High School. Some senior students from the floors below tried to save the children but the smoke and flames made it impossible to reach them, Malathi said.

Reports from the scene said some of the children had tried to flee down a narrow stairway but suffocated in the stampede. -AFP