DHAKA, 4 August 2004 — South Asia’s worst floods in 15 years are receding after killing around 1,370 people across the region and should be over soon, weather officials said yesterday.

But tackling the devastation left by the floodwaters and meeting the cost of rehabilitating people and infrastructure will be a daunting task for the authorities, officials and aid agencies said.

The flooding in mid-July caused damage worth about $7 billion in Bangladesh alone, the UN World Food Program added.

The floods have disrupted Bangladesh’s $4 billion textile industry, which earns nearly 80 percent of the country’s export earnings.

“The floods wiped out people’s household food stocks and effectively removed all other sources of nutrition and income. Fish farms are gone, poultry is drowned, fodder is unavailable for livestock so the animals are being sold at rock-bottom prices,” the WFP said in a statement.

“WFP has mobilized its existing in-country food supplies to distribute rice and high-energy biscuits to 1.8 million people, while calling on donors to support the agency’s steadily mounting relief campaign,” the statement quoted WFP’s country representative in Dhaka, Douglas Casson Coutts, as saying.

“We are getting strong indications that donors are prepared to be generous.”

Bangladesh’s minister for food and disaster management, Chowdhury Kamal ibn Yusuf, said the country has sufficient food and medicine to tackle the situation. “We have taken measures to feed 20 million people free of charge until next March,” he told journalists in Dhaka.

“We are determined to take care of them,” Yusuf said. “We are getting international assistance in addition to our own food stocks. No one will die from starvation.”

But relief distribution was often marred by chaos and shortage of supplies.

The current floods and accompanying diseases have so far killed more than 1,370 people across South Asia, 660 in Bangladesh and the rest in India’s Assam, Bihar and to a lesser extent, Gujarat states.

As floodwaters receded in Bangladesh and eastern India, monsoon flooding in Gujarat killed 19 people in the past two days and left more than 20,000 stranded on rooftops of submerged houses, police said.

The dead included three children whose house collapsed in heavy rains in Borsad, about 70 km south of the Gujarat’s main city, Ahmedabad. The slowly progressing monsoon has hit parts of western and northern India since Monday.

In Bangladesh, homeless people waiting in long queues at a school compound in Old Dhaka jostled to grab cooked food and drinking water offered by local volunteers, witnesses said.

“Hundreds of families crammed into the school shelter live a loathsome life with filth, stinks and flies all around,” one witness said.

In a relief center in Dhaka’s Badda district Amena Begum received 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of rice from relief workers yesterday. “I’ve got something to eat, but my five-month-old daughter has nothing to eat. They don’t give milk for babies here,” said Amena, who worked as a housemaid before the floods.

At Bosila on the capital’s outskirts, CARE Bangladesh, the local arm of the US charity, is handing out 20,000 liters of drinking water daily to villagers marooned by the floods.

“But we also need food to eat. Water alone cannot keep us alive for long,” said local resident Mokbul Ahmed, 80.

Coutts sounded a warning that, while the floodwaters were now receding, “Bangladesh may well be in for a cataclysmic flood in mid-August, when the next monsoon rains will be unable to drain into the waterlogged ground”.

“We have to be vigilant,” he said.

Minister Yusuf agreed and said another major flood later this month could cause what he called a colossal loss to food production.

Coutts said later in an interview the WFP was coordinating plans by several UN agencies and NGOs to launch a “flash appeal” for aid.

“We expect to have a final assessment of the losses in a few days, before the appeal goes out,” Coutts said. He praised the ability of Bangladesh’s government to meet the needs of the people most affected by the floods.

Britain has offered $9.1 million in immediate flood aid. UNICEF and the Federation of International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies have made a global appeal for aid to save Bangladeshi flood victims, especially women and children.

On Monday Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia said this year’s flooding had a much more devastating impact on the economy compared with floods in 1988 and 1998. “We have a much harder task ahead for rehabilitation of the people affected by the floods and of economy and infrastructure,” she said while handing out relief supplies in a Dhaka suburb.

The 1988 floods killed about 3,500 people in Bangladesh, and more than 500 were killed in 1998.

Tunnel Collapse

In northern India, a tunnel collapsed near a controversial dam, killing 11 workers, an official said yesterday.

Several people were feared trapped under the debris of the tunnel near the huge Tehri Dam which environment groups say is dangerous because it is being built in an earthquake-prone part of the Himalayas.

Dozens of workers were in the tunnel, which is being bored through a mountain, when it caved in on Monday night, an official said. There have been heavy rains in the area but the government said it was still investigating the cause of the collapse.

“We are not sure how many people are still trapped inside. We are still involved in the rescue operations,” said S.K. Das, principal home secretary of Uttaranchal state.

The Press Trust of India said the tunnel collapse was caused by rising floodwaters from the Bhagirathi River. Fed by incessant rains, the Bhagirathi has flooded parts of the town of Tehri.

Up to 60 workers of Jay Prakash Industries, which is constructing the dam, were in the tunnel when the mudslides occurred, PTI quoted Punit Kansal, the district magistrate, as saying. Officials said the dam itself was safe. The 261-meter-high Tehri Dam, the highest in Asia, has led to the displacement of tens of thousands of people as the main town of Tehri and some 125 villages are gradually submerged.

The government has pressed on with the construction of the dam despite protests by environment groups and activists such as Indian author Arundhati Roy.

Rescue operations were hindered by heavy monsoon rains in the region yesterday, local officials said. The dam is part of a massive hydro-electric project expected to produce 24,000 megawatts of electricity.