Indian officials rushed soldiers and air force helicopters to flood-ravaged parts of northern India to provide aid to the more than 1 million people stranded by a surging river, officials said yesterday.
The death toll from this year’s monsoon has already climbed past 800, and now some 1.2 million people have been marooned and about 2 million more affected in the impoverished state of Bihar, where the Kosi River has burst its banks, breached safety embankments and submerged all roads leading to the region.
Roughly 120 soldiers have joined government aid workers in the area and another 240 are preparing to help, said Prataya Amrit, a senior official at Bihar’s disaster ministry.
Four Indian air force helicopters were dropping food and medicine to the stranded, he said.
The state government has set up 300 relief camps to house people evacuated from the flooded areas, Amrit said. He said the rescued people may need to stay in these camps for several months as new embankments are built and the devastated areas regain some semblance of normalcy.
Pictures from the region on Tuesday, the first images since last week when flooding cut off the remote area from the rest of India, showed entire villages submerged and women wading through waist-high muddy waters, sacks of belongings balanced on their heads.
Families perched on the roofs of their houses waited for aid while others piled into overloaded canoes.
India’s monsoon season, which lasts from June to September, brings rain vital for the country’s farmers, but also massive destruction. Floods, mudslides, collapsing houses and lightning strikes kill hundreds of people every year.
Despite the rescue operations under way, officials in Bihar have warned that the real danger is still ahead.
When the swollen river burst its banks in Nepal just north of the Indian border, it changed course, flowing through a fresh channel some 120km to the east, which has no levees or protective embankments.
And with the river traditionally swelling to a peak and flooding in October, it threatens the area surrounding its new path with destruction.
“Save your lives and reach relief camps and other safe places. There is very little time to escape the death and destruction,” the state’s chief minister Nitish Kumar said in a radio announcement broadcast on Tuesday.
Officials said that because people were used to the cycle of the annual floods — temporarily taking shelter and then returning to their lands when the waters recede — they had failed to understand the magnitude of the new threat.
A UNICEF report issued on Tuesday said the rains have damaged roads and railway tracks, and water and electricity supplies have been affected.
As hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by the floods reach the relief camps there are fears of infectious diseases as well, the report said.
On Tuesday, police said 22 people had been killed as heavy rains brought several buildings crashing down in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh. That state has been the worst hit by this year’s monsoon, with more than 800 people killed by flooding since the annual rains began in June, an Uttar Pradesh police official Surendra Srivastava said.
Despite the dramatic flooding in Bihar, the state has had far fewer deaths than Uttar Pradesh. The state’s disaster management ministry said it had reports of 36 people being killed in the flooding and that some 60,000 hectares of farm land had been destroyed.
Last year, monsoon floods killed more than 2,200 people across South Asia and left 31 million others homeless, short of food or with other problems. The UN called last year’s floods the worst in living memory.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was