More Than 300 Killed, Hundreds of Thousands Evacuated as Monsoon Rains Flood India

Eric Chaney
Published: August 23,2016
More than 300 people have died in India and hundreds of thousands have been evacuated after monsoon rains flooded several states.
The rains have pushed the Ganges River and its tributaries to their limits, the Associated Press reports, flooding about 20 districts of the states of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
Bihar was hit especially hard; nearly 120 people were dead in that state alone, and another 5 million were impacted by the flooding, according to NBC News. Those impacts ranged from displacements and evacuations to destroyed crops, the report added. In total, 24 of Bihar's 38 districts have been hit by flooding.
"We have shifted people to higher ground, and they are being provided with cooked rice, clean drinking water, polythene sheets," Katihar district magistrate Zafar Rakib told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, as reported by NBC News.
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Indian mourners perform a cremation on the roof of a building overlooking the Manikarnika Ghat in Varanasi on Aug. 23, 2016.
(SANJAY KANOJIA/AFP/Getty Images)

Roughly 600,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in a dozen districts in eastern Bihar, the AP reports.
Six rivers are flowing above the danger mark in Bihar, where some residents were forced to the roofs of their homes to escape the rising waters, the BBC reports. Thousands have taken shelter in more than 80 relief camps, but their problems are just beginning one local resident says.
"We are facing a lot of problems, everything has been submerged in river,” a resident in Patna city told Reuters news agency. There is no arrangement of food, drinking water or boats. We don't know what to do.”
In neighboring Uttar Pradesh, water has been “gushing in the area” for the last three days, a villager told the BBC.
“All the land has been inundated with flood water. All the crops have been damaged. Water has started entering our houses," said a villager, Shyam.
The flooding in Uttar Pradesh has forced a halt to cremations at a main riverfront area of the Hindu holy town of Varanasi, District Magistrate Vijay Karan Anand told the AP. Devout Hindus bring dead family members to Varanasi in the belief that being cremated there frees their soul from the cycle of death and rebirth.
The army and air force are on standby because more rain is forecast in the next two days, disaster management official Vyasji, who uses one name, told the AP.
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed concern over the worsening flood situation and promised total support from the central government in rescue and relief operations, the Financial Express reports.
“Centre assures total support in the rescue & relief operations,” he said in a tweet. “I hope the situation in the affected areas normalises at the earliest.”
But some victims have expressed anger and impatience at the quantity and quality of flood relief efforts thus far, News 18 reports.
"At some places, flood victims blocked roads to protest against inadequate relief," an official of disaster management department told the station.
In Begusarai district, flood victims blocked roads for hours demanding adequate relief, and in Nathnagar in Bhagalpur district victims staged a protest demanding the same.
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