BOMBAY, 29 July 2005 — Monsoon continue to lash the western region of India as the state of Gujarat now faced the fury after a three-day relentless soaking to Maharashtra, whose capital Bombay was brought to a near standstill, yesterday.
Floods, landslides and building collapses caused by India’s heaviest-ever recorded rainfall have killed at lest 786 people, police said. Weather officials predicted more heavy rain for the city of 15 million, where schools, banks and stock markets were closed and public transport barely operating.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who yesterday toured the rain-ravaged areas in a helicopter, said he was “deeply pained by this human tragedy” and promised aid for the Maharashtra state government from the national calamity relief fund.
B.M. Kulkarni, who heads Maharashtra state’s police emergency control room, said that 273 people had died in Bombay and at least 513 in other parts of the state. He said the death toll rose sharply after more than 160 deaths by drowning were reported in Bombay.
“Around 166 people drowned in these floods and these numbers came in only much later,” Kulkarni said.
Bombay was limping slowly back to normalcy, after rains stopped intermittently last evening and waterlogging in several suburbs was receding fast. The local trains, the lifeline of the people of Bombay, which had come to a complete standstill for the past two days, were operating on both the Central and Western lines.
While the people of Bombay and the state ejoyed the break from the rains, it was now Gujarat’s turn to bear the brunt of the rains. Traffic was disrupted in several cities of Gujarat, particularly in low lying areas. There were no reports of casualties so far.
Aerial pictures of Bombay showed much of the city marooned in debris-laden water. Long queues of vehicles were stranded on highways. However, the main airport reopened early afternoon after being closed since Tuesday due to waterlogged runways.
Aside from allowing the resumption of commercial flights, the reopening had allowed the air force to start flying in relief materials, the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency said.
Heavy casualties occurred in a remote village in Raighad district of the rain-lashed state, where at least 100 people from 20 families were feared killed by a landslide.
Tons of mud flattened houses in Jui village, 170 kilometers (105 miles) south of Bombay, on Monday but news of the tragedy reached authorities only three days later, the report said.
The state government had declared public holiday for the third consecutive day. Stock exchanges and banks were also closed. People experienced acute shortage of vegetable and essential commodities and prices of vegetables skyrocketed.
There was a landslide at the Bhattan tunnel on the Pune-Bombay Expressway. Elsewhere in the state, flood waters receded in the districts of Kolhapur, Satara, Ahmednagar, Beed and Parbhani. However, rains continued in the flood-affected district of Raigad in the Konkan region.
Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said that every possible help and assistance will be given to those dead and injured and families whose houses have been lost will be rehabilitated. A special control room has been set up at the secretariat to monitor the flood situation.
— With input from agencies
