More than 2,200 dead in flood-hit South Asia

INDIA: The death toll from South Asia’s worst floods in 30 years topped 2,200 on Sunday as torrential monsoon rains resumed in several parts of the subcontinent, officials said.

The floods have affected 30 million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal since the start of the annual monsoon season in June, and many are still dependent on food and drinking water provided by relief workers.

As survivors struggled to clean up their flooded homes, heavy rains again lashed five states in northern and eastern India, including hardest-hit Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, officials said.

In impoverished Bihar, where about 15 million people have been displaced and scores of roads remain submerged, 39 people died in flood-related incidents since Saturday night, officials in the state capital Patna said.

One of the victims was a man beaten to death by police Sunday after he joined a protest to demand food at a relief centre in Saharsa district, local administrator Niranjan Kumar Choudhry said.

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for tens of millions of dollars in emergency aid at a meeting in New Delhi late Sunday.

“The prime minister assured his government will give all possible assistance to Bihar,” Singh’s spokesman Sanjaya Baru said after the talks.

In northern India, 15 people have died since late Saturday, including a television reporter whose jeep plunged into a gorge, police and officials from the privately-run Zee Television station said.

The latest deaths took the toll in India alone to at least 1,722, according to one official count, but that figure did not take into account those killed in numerous boat accidents in Assam, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh states. At least 411 people have died in Bangladesh and another 99 in Nepal.

International organisations and foreign governments from Saudi Arabia to Canada have offered millions of dollars in aid, mainly for Nepal and Bangladesh, where some 40 percent of the land is under water.

Tens of thousands of people have been admitted to hospital this month with diarrhoea and other water-borne diseases, Habiba Khatun of the Bangladeshi health department said Sunday.

In Nepal, where 300,000 people were affected by the floods, officials said the first priority was to prevent a disease epidemic.

“We are in high alert regarding epidemic breakout from water-borne diseases in the flood- and landslide-affected districts,” said Ishwar Regmi, an official at Nepal’s home ministry.

New Delhi, Monday, AFP