India and Nepal blamed each other yesterday for some of the worst flooding in South Asia in decades, which has affected 25 million people and left rescuers scrambling to help victims.
Officials in Bihar, the Indian state worst affected by the inundation, said neighboring Nepal had failed to build dams to control water surging down from the Himalayas.
But Nepal hit back immediately, claiming that Indian dams were to blame for the flooding in Nepal.
PHOTO: AFP
"We can't do anything about the amount of water coming from Nepal," said Purna Kumari Subedi, member of parliament for Nepal's Banke District, which borders Bihar.
"The same thing happened last year. Because of the dam constructed at Laxmanpur on the Indian side, a lot more land on the Nepali side was extremely flooded, affecting thousands of people," Subedi said.
The dam was against Nepal's interests and should be destroyed, she said.
Nepal's foreign ministry said India could have helped to alleviate the flooding upstream in the Himalayan kingdom.
"Some of the Terai plains areas bordering India were flooded because dams on the Indian side were kept closed," said Arjun Bahadur Thapa, Nepal's foreign ministry spokesman.
"We have not been able to sit for talks with our Indian counterparts about this as we are both busy dealing with the flooding," he said.
Torrential monsoon rains caused flooding and landslides that have killed at least 93 people and affected about 270,000 in Nepal.
But flooding described as the worst in 30 years has affected 11.5 million people in Bihar. More than 90 people have died in the last two weeks.
More than 6,000 villages were submerged with at least 2 million people living outdoors, said Manoj Srivastava, the state's disaster management chief.
The skies cleared yesterday, but a UN official warned that rivers upstream in Nepal were still overflowing, making it unlikely the flood water would recede soon.
Bihar authorities have sought federal government intervention to tackle the issue with Nepal, claiming excessive water flow had engulfed hundreds of villages in the Indian state that in the past had been unaffected by flooding.
"We have written to the prime minister to take up the issue with the Nepalese authorities," Bihar's chief minister Nitish Kumar said in the state capital of Patna.
"Floods are an annual feature because all rivers originating in the upper regions of the Himalayan kingdom send massive amounts of water, especially into northern regions of the state," Kumar said.
Rains have eased in Nepal but authorities are concerned about outbreaks of water borne diseases as villagers slowly begin to return to their homes.
In the Indian eastern state of Orissa, at least 30,000 homeless people were living without food and water as heavy monsoon showers continued, officials said yesterday.
"I don't have a morsel to eat at home and have not been able to go the market also," said Sanjay Rout, a government employee confined to his house for days in Bhubaneswar, the partially flooded state capital.
Schools and colleges were shut and hundreds of people moved to higher ground.
At least 17 people have either drowned or been killed in lightning strikes in Orissa since last Saturday.
In the northeastern state of Assam, hundreds of private doctors began volunteering to help government hospitals cope with an influx of people with dysentery, diarrhea, fevers and skin diseases.
"There is every possibility of an outbreak of epidemic in the state," said Nareswar Dutta, president of the state branch of the Indian Medical Association.
"We have asked all our mem-bers in Assam to provide all possible services to the people in flood-affected areas," Dutta said.
Health workers said Assam's overcrowded relief camps have become unhygienic as people are crammed together with cattle and poultry.
"Most of the sick are children," one official said.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees