NEW DELHI (AlertNet) ? More than five million people in India have been hit by floods caused by annual monsoon rains, forcing many to flee as rivers burst their banks and torrents of water washed away homes, aid workers and government officials said on Friday.
South Asia experiences monsoon rains from June to September, which are vital for its agriculture. But the rains frequently affect millions of people in countries like India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Nepal devastating crops, destroying homes and sparking outbreaks of diseases such as diarrhoea and dysentery.
Aid workers estimate that 5.2 million people in the worst hit areas of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Assam in the northeast of the country have had their lives disrupted by the flooding, which was sparked by incessant rains that caused burgeoning rivers to overflow and embankments to breach. 158 people have died so far, mainly due to drowning.
"The number of people affected by the floods has more than doubled in the last ten days. We have sent teams to do more accurate assessments of the situation, but we do feel it's going to get worse," warned John Roche, country representative for the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) in India, adding that it some places it was continuing to rain.
Roche said villagers remained stranded in some areas as flood waters had made it difficult for search and rescue teams to reach them, while hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced and forced to seek refuge on higher ground until water levels receded.
In the most severely affected state of Uttar Pradesh, 125 people have died and around 2 million have been affected, said government officials, adding that authorities had deployed rescue and relief teams with hundreds of boats, to dispatch aid to flood-hit communities and set up around 200 relief camps.
"Of the 29 districts which have been affected by floods, 10 are in a critical state," said the state's Relief Commissioner K.K. Sinha, adding that about 70,000 people were homeless and around 300,500 hectares of mainly rice paddy had been destroyed.
PROTESTS
Monsoon rains often cause mighty rivers like the Brahmaputra and its tributaries to rise to dangerous levels and overflow, inundating vast low-lying areas.
Experts say decades of mass deforestation have led to soil erosion where sediment is washed downstream, ending up in rivers where it builds up on the river bed and raises the levels of water far higher than normal.
Poor management in regulating water levels in dams has also led to huge volumes being released into rivers over a short period and local populations have accused officials of siphoning off funds meant for flood risk projects, resulting in shoddy repair and the construction of embankments that are regularly breached.
In Bihar, where about 2.6 million people from 1,364 villages have been affected, major rivers are continuing to rise above danger levels. Local authorities say they have launched "relief and rehabilitation works on a war-footing," but hundreds of angry villagers have been protesting, complaining of the lack of aid.
"We've been left to starve. There is just no one to take care of us," Nitu Devi, a local village elder, told reporters during a demonstration outside the office of the district magistrate in Bihar's flood-hit Bhojpur area on Friday.
"We have lost both the present and the future," she said, referring to the fact that their homes, as well as their mainstay of income rice paddy had been destroyed by the disaster.
(AlertNet is a global humanitarian news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation. Visit www.trust.org/alertnet)
(Additional reporting by Alka Pande in Lucknow, Biswajyoti Das in Assam)
(Editing by Rebekah Curtis)
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