MORE THAN 200 people have died in torrential rain in southern India over the past five days and nearly a million people have been displaced in the worst downpour in a over a century.
Officials yesterday said 170 had died in Karnataka state and another 37 in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh as incessant showers lashed the region, submerging towns and villages, snapping transport and communications links and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.
With thousands still trapped in remote flood-hit areas, the death toll could significantly increase, officials say.
There is also the prospect of disease spreading in relief camps crowded mostly with poor people, forced to flee their poorly constructed mud and stone homes and now facing shortages of clean drinking water and protection from mosquitoes.
Television reports showed thousands of people waving from rooftops at air force helicopters carrying relief materials while others were clinging precariously to tree branches in areas that remained largely inaccessible after four days of flooding.
“Most of the deaths were largely due to houses collapsing in the flash floods,” H V Parashwanath of Karnataka’s disaster monitoring agency in the provincial capital Bangalore said.
“There is death and destruction all around us,” senior provincial minister Basavaraj Bommai said, adding that large tracts of agricultural land including sugar cane and paddy fields were inundated, likely to cause hardship for poor farmers when the water recedes.
Scores of military helicopters dropped food and drinking water to thousands of marooned villages and hundreds of naval divers rescued people trapped in swirling floodwaters.
Army soldiers used boats to ferry villagers stranded on rooftops to government schools or relief camps on higher ground but facilities there were poor and overcrowded.
More than 700 relief centres had been set up in the contiguous states to accommodate nearly 500,000 homeless people, a number barely enough to accommodate the numbers flocking to them.
Personnel from India’s National Disaster Response Force were also deployed and officials said hundreds of doctors were labouring to halt the outbreak of disease.
“We are deploying medical teams in the affected areas to prevent the occurrence of epidemics,” S Subramanyam, special commissioner for disaster management in Andhra Pradesh’s capital Hyderabad, said.
And though the rain lessened somewhat yesterday, flooding worsened after authorities released water from rain-swollen reservoirs and dams in both states to prevent them from bursting their banks and wreaking further havoc.
Karnataka chief minister B S Yeddyurappa, who ordered an aerial survey of the flooded region, has asked the federal administration for $2 billion dollars in aid to help rebuild homes and provide basic relief to those affected.
Ironically, a fortnight earlier parts of the flood-ravaged regions were suffering severe drought following insufficient monsoon rains.
Weather officials said an area of low pressure over the Bay of Bengal had triggered the devastating downpour.
However, environmentalists said global warming and climate change were responsible for both the drought and the unseasonal rain, and they urged the government and the international community to implement remedial measures swiftly.