The Indian army and navy stepped up efforts yesterday to rescue hundreds of thousands of people marooned by floods, while rising river levels also rang alarm bells in Bangladesh.
In India’s impoverished eastern state of Bihar, villagers have been living on rooftops for days, while others are eating plants and leaves after exhausting food stocks.
Aid agencies said the Bihar government should have done more to anticipate the disaster and plan relief operations in a region hit by monsoon flooding every year.
PHOTO: EPA
“Lessons from the past disasters should be kept in mind while planning response,” ActionAid said in a statement. “A long-term comprehensive response is necessary to deal with relief, recovery and disaster preparedness.”
Three million people have been displaced from their homes and at least 90 killed by floods in Bihar, officials say, after the Kosi river burst a dam in Nepal, swamping hundreds of villages in Bihar and destroying 100,000 hectares of farmland.
In Bihar, hundreds of boats are being used to evacuate people but more are needed, while heavy rains over the past few days have hampered rescue and relief operations, officials said.
“Such is the extent of devastation that the forces deployed are proving too small,” Pratyay Amrit, a senior state disaster management official, said yesterday.
The army, which had already deployed five columns of around 120 men, sent in another 14, officials said yesterday, while three naval companies were also asked to help.
The situation on the ground was getting desperate.
“We don’t have any more food grain stocks left and me and my family are all chewing plants and leaves to stay alive,” Mohan Sharma said by telephone from Supaul district.
TV pictures showed people fighting to get places in boats, as soldiers in life jackets tried to restore order.
More than 467,000 people have been evacuated so far, but there are thousands still marooned. Activists and local media say the death toll could be many times higher than official estimates.
Some specialists have blamed the floods on heavier monsoon rains caused by global warming, while others say authorities have failed to take preventive measures and improve infrastructure.
The UN warned that “the heat, combined with limited supplies of safe drinking water and poor hygiene conditions, poses a great risk of water and vector-borne diseases.”
In one camp set up at a school in Saharsa district — one of the worst hit of the five flooded districts in Bihar — a nurse was trying to treat the sick armed with just one packet of paracetamol tablets.
In India’s northeastern state of Assam, rising rivers broke mud embankments and swamped more than 100 villages, forcing 50,000 people from their homes.
Two people drowned overnight, raising the death toll in the northeast region to 34.
In Bangladesh, about half a million people were marooned after several rivers in the north and central districts broke their banks and swamped villages and farmlands.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
RSS