Monsoon floods displace 19 million in India

Torrents of water washed away homes, crops and cows, leaving hungry and frightened villagers perched in treetops or on roofs as the death toll rose today from monsoon rains across northern India and Bangladesh.

Vital to farmers, the annual rains have always been a blessing and a curse in the subcontinent – a fact apparent as ever as officials said at least 186 people have been killed and 19 million driven from their homes in recent days.

Even in areas where the rains are no worse than usual, the monsoon disrupted life.

In Mumbai, the country’s bustling financial capital, people waded through knee-deep water that covered many streets today after severe overnight rains flooded sewers.

The South Asian monsoon season runs from June to September as the rains work their way across the subcontinent. It’s always dangerous – last year more than 1,000 people died, most by drowning, in landslides or house collapses.

This year, estimates of the cumulative death toll vary wildly from a few hundred to well over a thousand.

With hundreds of villages submerged across the fertile plans that stretch along the southern edge of the Himalayas, people were taking refuge wherever they could – in the Uttar Pradesh state, in northern India, women and children were spotted screaming for help from treetops.

They were in many ways the lucky ones – in some places river levels rose so fast that villagers couldn’t flee.

“The gush of water was so sudden we did not get the time to react,” Vinod Kumar, a resident of a flooded village in Basti district, told Enadu TV, a local television.

He made it out, but lost everything. “We do not have food, kerosene or even a match box,” he said. “The officials are saying relief is coming, but nothing has come so far.”

Health workers, meanwhile, were fanning out across parts of Bangladesh and India to try to prevent the spread of waterborne diseases like diarrhoea, typhoid and cholera.

In north-western Bangladesh, farmer Rahmat Sheikh and his family were among the 2,000 villagers who fled their flooded village for higher ground in the Sirajganj district.

“The floods have taken away all I had,” said the 40-year-old. “Rice paddies in the field, two cows and my house all are gone. I don’t know how we will now survive.”

Sirajganj, 65 miles north-west of the capital of Dhaka, is one of the country’s hardest-hit areas, and officials said they were dispatching food, water and medicine there.

Like most of those displaced, Sheikh will return home as soon as the waters recede and start rebuilding.

The more immediate problem is finding enough food. With many farms and crops destroyed – costing an already poor region millions of pounds – food shortages were becoming a pressing problem.

One woman in Uttar Pradesh who identified herself only as Savitra said she had not “eaten anything for the last two days.”

“Whatever we had at our home was washed away,” she told Enadu TV.

In the north-eastern state of Assam, Haneefa Begum and her two children said the portions of rice and lentils at their makeshift relief camp were not enough to stave off hunger.

So far this year, some 14 million people in India and 5 million in Bangladesh have been displaced or marooned by the flooding, according to government figures.

At least 132 people have died in recent days because of the floods in India and 54 more in Bangladesh.

In one of the worst single incidents this year, 28 people died when an overcrowded boat evacuating them capsized on an engorged river yesterday.

In Assam, about 100,000 displaced people were staying in government relief camps while hundreds of thousands of others sought shelter on higher ground, setting up makeshift dwellings. Millions of people have been cut off from the rest of the country.

In Bangladesh, the floods inundated parts of a major highway connecting Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, with much of the rest of the country.

India’s Meteorological Department said unusual monsoon patterns this year have led to heavier than normal rains. “We’ve been getting constant rainfall in these areas for nearly 20 days,” said B P Yadav, a spokesman for the department.