More than a million people have been forced from their homes and 250 000 houses destroyed in one of the worst floods in northern India for decades, prompting accusations that the destruction was manmade.
The Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, called the flood a ”national calamity” after the Kosi River burst its banks in Nepal 10 days ago, sending waves of water across a swath of the eastern flank of the Himalayas and submerging large parts of the Indian state of Bihar.
On Thursday the Indian army was mobilised — evacuating more than 100 000 people and dropping food supplies from the air. Pratyaya Amrit, Bihar’s secretary for disaster management, said more than 400 000 people would be moved to relief camps by the weekend.
Singh and Sonia Gandhi, head of the ruling Congress party, flew over devastated areas by helicopter on Thursday. The prime minister later said more helicopters would be used to rescue thousands of villagers marooned in distant villages and assured them of more financial assistance.
The United States announced a $100 000 flood-relief package for the victims. Aid agencies, including Unicef, are in Bihar distributing food, clothes and medicines.
”We have the army, disaster management teams, police and other groups of rescuers making every effort to save the population,” said RK Singh, a senior disaster management official.
Relief agencies said that Bihar’s status as the poorest, most deprived state in India meant victims of the annual monsoons were especially vulnerable.
Thomas Chandy, chief executive officer for Save the Children, said: ”During our flood response last year we found that the levels of children trafficked from the state increased in large numbers. Two of the affected districts, Arraria and Katiyar, according to our study, have the highest instance of child trafficking. The current disaster will increase levels of poverty and desperation and create a favourable environment for traffickers.”
Experts said corruption in India was largely responsible for the disaster. The Kosi’s embankment is meant to handle almost one million cubic feet of water per second, yet the river was breached at around a tenth of capacity, pointing to serious defects in the river system.
Nepal, where the Kosi originates, accused India of failing to uphold its commitment, under a 1954 treaty, to maintain the embankment. India claims that its engineers cannot get access to the river.
But Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the independent South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People said: ”The monsoon comes every year. Why weren’t they ready for the disaster? The fact is that there was much less flow in the river than the stated capacity, which exposes the kind of maintenance that was done.”
Thakkar said that there was an ”unfortunate lobby consisting of politicians, bureaucrats, builders and engineers who take money and don’t do any work. There is no oversight of this process. That’s why we get flooding every year.”
Torrential rains have killed more than 1 000 people in South Asia since the monsoon began in June, mainly in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where 725 people died. Other deaths were reported from Nepal and Bangladesh. – guardian.co.uk