Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa has written to Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh [Images] requesting to set up a tsunami warning centre in Chennai.

Such a centre would "psychologically reassure the coastal population," she said in her letter, was released to the media on Friday.

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The CM proposed that the centre be set up at the National Institute of Ocean Technology, a premier institute in Chennai, instead of the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services in Hyderabad, as proposed earlier.

She insisted that NIOT is "well established and well recognised and it will not be appropriate to locate this (the TWC) in some other institution inland."

Jayalalithaa said that during her meeting with Singh on January 7 she had specifically mentioned the need for establishing a TWC in Chennai.

"I had suggested that as the Tamil Nadu coast was most severely affected, such a centre should be established in Chennai," she said.

The operational objective of the TWC in the Indian Ocean was to detect and locate major earthquakes in the region and to provide timely and effective tsunami information and warnings, official sources said.

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