Floods Leave 300,000 Homeless in India's East
Date: 19-Jun-08
Country: INDIA
Author: Jatindra Dash
More than 300,000 people have lost their homes so far, and are scattered between camps, highways and makeshift shelters on higher ground, officials said. Rising river waters have broken through mud embankments and flooded vast areas.
"Flood waters have submerged thousands of acres of land, disrupted electricity, roads and rail communication in many districts," S. Barai, a senior state government official told Reuters in Bhubaneswar, capital of the eastern state of Orissa.
Hundreds of people are camping on highways and authorities have asked them to move to higher ground, saying the weather could worsen in the next few days. Others are stranded.
"We are not able to move out of our homes, because the roads are cut off since last night in our town," Mohhammed Rafiq Khan, a resident of the worst-hit Balasore district said.
In the neighbouring state of West Bengal, soldiers used speedboats to help evacuate flood victims.
Monsoon rains have also lashed India's remote northeast, killing at least 30 people in the region since the weekend.
In tea-rich Assam state, thousands of people were still living in waist-deep water. Officials said teams of doctors and paramedics had been sent to flood-hit areas.
"Although there are no reports of any outbreak of diseases, we are taking no chances," Assam's Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said.
Assam accounts for about 55 percent of India's tea production, but officials said they were still to get reports of rains affecting the tea trade.
(Additional reporting by Sujoy Dhar in Kolkata and Biswajyoti Das in Guwahati; Writing by Bappa Majumdar; Editing by Simon Denyer)
(For the latest Reuters news on India see http://in.reuters.com, for blogs see http://blogs.reuters.com/in/ )
