Overflowing rivers have swamped villages in South Asia, leaving millions of residents stranded in their flooded homes and 272 people dead in the annual monsoon rains, officials and news reports said.
The casualties are the result of waterborne diseases, electrocution, building collapses and drownings since the torrential rains began in mid-June across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.
The annual monsoon rains, combined with melting snow, fill rivers to overflowing with the water flooding land for kilometres.
Houses, schools, railroads and roads have been inundated.
With more rain forecast over the next few days in Bangladesh and India’s northeast, the flooding is likely to worsen, relief officials said on Tuesday.
Tarum Gogoi, the top elected official in India’s Assam state, said officials asked the Red Cross for food, clothes, tents, drinking water and mosquito nets to help more than two million victims in the state — where at least 39 people have died. They have also requested doctors, nurses and medicine.
Four new deaths were reported in India’s eastern Bihar state on Tuesday, pushed the toll there to 62. Monsoon rains have also claimed 45 lives in southern Kerala state and 17 in northern Uttar Pradesh state. A total of 166 flood-related deaths have been reported in India.
In neighbouring Bangladesh, the rains have engulfed 25 of its 64 districts since late last month, stranding more than three million people in their flooded homes and killing 54.
The rain-swollen Jamuna River rose out of its banks on Tuesday, flooding 40 villages and killing five people, including a mother and her young son in northern Sirajganj district.
Five other people drowned in the northeastern Sylhet and Sunamganj districts where the Surma River overflowed its banks.
Elsewhere in the country’s north eight other people — mostly children — drowned on Monday.
Weather officials in Dhaka, the national capital, said the flooding will likely worsen as heavy rains continue and flood waters from neighbouring India flow into Bangladesh.
Bangladesh sits in the basins of the region’s largest rivers, the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Jamuna, which originate in the Himalayas and run through India before draining into the Bay of Bengal.
In Pakistan, five people were killed by collapsing homes or roofs in Mardan district in the country’s northwest. About 50 others were injured late on Sunday in several villages in Mardan, 120km northwest of the capital, Islamabad.
Rescue workers made the most of improving weather in Nepal and rushed emergency supplies to thousands of people left homeless by monsoon flooding in the country’s south, where 47 people have died in the disaster. — Sapa-AP