500,000 stranded by Bangladesh floods

Flooding caused by monsoon rains have stranded hundreds of thousands people in Bangladesh and India, and a lack of boats, food and drinking water has hit rescue and relief work, officials said on Tuesday.

In low-lying Bangladesh, more than half a million people have been marooned in towns and villages in the north of the country after the Brahmaputra and Padma rivers burst their banks.

A local official in Bogra district said she had received frantic calls from people in flooded villages calling for help.

“Please send us a boat,” Furti Begum quoted one desperate villager as saying in a mobile phone call from the village near Bogra town. “Probably this is my last call.”

Thousands of people had been living on rooftops for over a week, but evacuating them was difficult due to a shortage of boats, she said.

Across the border in India’s eastern states, tens of thousands of villagers have been displaced from their homes or were cut off and officials said lack of resources and equipment such as motor boats was making rescue efforts difficult.

In the impoverished state of Bihar, which has seen incessant rain for the past week, 48 school girls remained trapped for the third day on the first floor of their boarding school in the northern district of Darbhanga.

“We are taking steps to shift the girls to safer places and also arranging food and drinking water for them,” said Ramji Prasad, a local official.

In the northeastern state of Assam, thousands of displaced people are staying in makeshift shelters under tarpaulin sheets by the side of roads, on bridges and in government buildings.

Homeless people complained that food supplies given by the government were unfit for use and accused authorities of not coordinating relief efforts.

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Villagers in wooden boats and bamboo rafts were moving to higher areas such as bridges and those who had managed to reach relief camps faced shortages of food, drinking water and medicines, witnesses said.

Hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland has been submerged across tea- and oil-rich Assam, affecting around two million farmers.

Roads and major highways across the hilly region have also been blocked due to landslides and some roads have been washed away by gushing waters.

At least 75 people have died in the past week in Assam and Bihar.

Incessant rains over the past week have also triggered landslides in the neighboring Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan and bridges have been washed away disrupting road networks in many parts of the country, authorities said.

In Nepal, authorities have alerted people against the outbreak of water-borne diseases following the rains that have disrupted road and air travel, washed away homes, cut off power supplies and inundated thousands of hectares of crops.