Millions Are Displaced by Floods in India

The New York Times
Half a Million Are Stranded by India Flood
By HEATHER TIMMONS
Published: September 1, 2008

NEW DELHI — Half a million victims remain stranded after last week’s floods in northern India destroyed hundreds of rural villages. Aid workers say food and drinkable water are running out in overcrowded camps that house thousands of displaced farmers and their families.

Many flood victims in remote corners of Bihar, one of India’s poorest and most populous states, have gone without food for days, government officials and aid workers said. They may have to wait in trees and on rooftops for several more days before help arrives. Meanwhile, aid workers worry that at any time contagious diseases could break out in the makeshift refugee camps, where a quarter million people are living.

“The enormity of the problem is stupendous,” Mukesh Puri, an emergency specialist with the United Nations Children’s Fund, said in a telephone interview from Patna, the capital of Bihar, on Monday night. Unicef is dispatching public health teams, distributing rehydrating salts and water purification tablets, and setting up maternity huts for the dozens of pregnant women coming into the camps, he said.

Some officials say the eventual death toll will reach into the thousands. So far the official count by the Bihar government is fewer than 100.

The flooding has affected more than three million people. It began two weeks ago when the Kosi River breached a dam across the border in Nepal and overflowed its banks downstream in India. The Kosi often floods the Bihar plains during monsoon season, but the flooding this year has been the worst in five decades, in part because the swollen river reached villages rarely threatened by high water that were unprepared to deal with it.

Millions Are Displaced by Floods in India

By HEATHER TIMMONS and HARI KUMAR
Published: August 29, 2008

NEW DELHI — Millions of farmers and their families may be displaced for months after severe floods in northern India wiped out crops and homes, leaving hundreds of villages under several feet of water.

Rescue efforts continued on Friday, and boats were dispatched and trains mobilized to find and move millions who have been left stranded by the rising waters. More than 2.1 million people and over 394 square miles have been affected by the flooding, the Bihar government said on Friday. About a quarter of a million people have been evacuated.