Floods wreak havoc in northeast India

Indian villagers walk through floodwaters in the village of Samastipur, some 100km northeast of Patna yesterday. Indian army authorities are using helicopters and boats to rescue stranded villagers as fourteen districts in Bihar reported flooding with some 25 people dead. PHOTO: AFP

Two people were washed away in Nalbari district of Assam taking the state's death toll in recent floods to 67 and the national toll to 101.

"This is the worst flooding in recent memory with 22 of the 24 districts in Assam under floodwater," Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi told AFP.

"The high water current has washed away rows and rows of villages. The condition of the people is really devastating."

About 3.7 million people have been displaced with an estimated 3,200 villages under water, a flood control official said.

The Brahmaputra River which criss-crosses the state was flowing at least 1.5 to 2.6 meters (5.00-8.25 feet) above the danger level. Several parts of the state remained cut off as floodwaters swamped highways and created craters.

Hundreds of thousands of people were taking shelter on raised bamboo stilts and on mud embankments, with some trapped on rooftops of their mud-and-straw huts.

"We are trying our best to provide food and medicines to the victims. But then as we all know, it is next to impossible to meet the needs of millions of flood-hit people," Assam Health Minister Bhumidhar Barman said.

In the adjoining state of Arunachal Pradesh, heavy landslides and flooding have cut off several districts from the rest of the country, an official said.

Torrential rains have triggered landslides in Tripura and Manipur. Road links between the two states and the rest of India have been blocked since Monday.

Floods and landslides have also hit the neighbouring Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan where at least a dozen bridges have been washed away, a Bhutanese foreign ministry official said by telephone from capital Thimphu.

"There was a dam burst over the weekend and that also uprooted power transmission towers causing immense hardship in the kingdom," he added.

Meanwhile, floodwaters Tuesday entered the Kaziranga Wildlife Sanctuary in Assam forcing scores of endangered animals to flee.

"A vast stretch of the Kaziranga National Park has come under floodwater and in some areas the water level rose to about five feet (1.5 metres)," H.K. Bhuyan, a park ranger, told AFP.

The 430-square-kilometre (266-square-mile) park east of Assam's principal city of Guwahati is home to the world's largest concentration of one-horned rhinoceros.

There are an estimated 1,600 rhinos at Kaziranga out of a total world population of some 2,300.

"Herds of elephants, deer, wild buffaloes and rhinos from the park are migrating to an adjoining hill for safety," another park official said.

Some 70 animals, including rhinos and wild buffaloes, were drowned by flooding in the sanctuary last year.