The success story of bihar

Thursday, August 02, 2007

South Asia struggles with floods



Millions of people have been displaced by severe flooding caused by heavy monsoon rains in northern India, Bangladesh and Nepal.


More than 12 million are displaced or marooned in the Indian states of Assam, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, officials say.
A third of neighbouring Bangladesh is inundated, with nearly 40 people killed and some five million affected by the floods, the authorities say.
Nepal's government says that 86 people have died in the torrential rainfall.
The BBC's Sanjoy Majumder in Delhi says that these floods have been described as the worst floods in 10 years in northern India.
Vast stretches of fertile countryside are under water, damaging farmland and flooding thousands of villages.
It has been raining heavily in the region for more than a week and many of the rivers which flow through northern India and into Bangladesh are overflowing.
In some places they have burst their banks.
Flood politics
Bihar's State Disaster Management Committee chairman Manoj Srivastava told the BBC that the flood situation was quite "serious".
At least 121 relief camps and 34 cattle camps had been set up in the flood-affected areas of Bihar, he said.

The Patna High Court has recently criticised the state government for its failure to deliver relief materials.
Bihar's former chief minister and the current federal railway minister, Laloo Prasad Yadav, made an aerial tour of the region on Wednesday and accused the state government of "criminal negligence".
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is out of the state on business.
State Governor RS Gavai has appealed to all party leaders to bury their political differences and work together to help flood victims.
Uttar Pradesh has also been hard hit.
The two worst affected districts are reported to be Gorakhpur and Kushinagar, although water levels in major rivers there are said to have stopped rising for the moment.
Army assistance
Many roads and bridges in the states of Bihar and Assam, the worst affected, have been damaged making it harder for the authorities to get relief material to those affected.
The army is using helicopters to drop supplies but aid agencies are already warning of shortages of food and drinking water.

Almost six million are affected in Assam, authorities say
In Bangladesh, a country that is predominantly low-lying, hundreds of thousands of people are camping on embankments or on the roofs of their homes waiting for relief.
One man who abandoned his home in Sirajganj, 110km (70 miles) north-west of Dhaka, said he and his family had lost everything.
"We are suffering too much here in this makeshift shelter. The flood has destroyed all of our belongings, we could save nothing," he told the BBC.
Many are using boats to move around.
Bangladesh's military-backed interim government has said it is doing its best to cope.
In Nepal, several rivers that flow down from the Himalayas have burst their banks in the heavily populated and low-lying Terai region that borders Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
The BBC's Mark Dummett in Kathmandu says that some people have blamed India for worsening the situation because it has not opened dams on its side of the border.
But, authorities in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh say that the release of flood waters by Nepal causes flooding on their side of the border.

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