Fresh floods hit India, another 150,000 homeless

Fresh flooding left 150,000 homeless in India's West Bengal state and authorities were struggling to get emergency supplies to cut-off villages, officials said yesterday.

Eight days of heavy, late-monsoon season rain have forced about 800,000 people from their homes in the densely populated eastern state. Three people have been killed.

"Hundreds of people are stranded on roofs waiting to be rescued," a state official said by telephone.

Tens of thousands of mud houses have collapsed or been damaged as major rivers including the Bhagirathi and Ichhamati burst their banks, forcing thousands of residents along their banks into hundreds of government flood shelters.

"We are facing difficulties in reaching remote areas because some main roads have been damaged by floods," Manjunath Prasad, a magistrate in badly hit Murshidabad district, said.

Monsoon flooding in South Asia has killed more than 2,000 people since June and made millions homeless in low-lying eastern India and neighbouring Bangladesh and cost billions of dollars in damage.

Huge tracts of land in Bangladesh have been under water for a week or more after the heaviest downpours in more than half-a-century.

Two UN agencies said yesterday Bangladeshi children and women faced acute malnutrition and without intervention, the number of malnourished children in flood affected areas could rise to one million within six to eight weeks.

About 1,000 people died in Bangladesh in weeks of severe flooding in July and August. It was hit by another spell of record monsoon rain in September.

The flooding has left 10 million of the country's 130 million people homeless and health officials say diarrhoea and pneumonia have killed 350 people, most of them children, and affected 330,000 since mid-July.

The rainy season will end across South Asia from late September.