NEW DELHI, 11 August 2007 — Authorities rushed food, drinking water and medicine to India’s flood-hit areas yesterday to ward off epidemics, as thousands of people returned to their damaged homes and the death toll in South Asia rose above 2,000.
Torrential rains have stranded some 19 million in the past two weeks across much of northern India, Bangladesh and Nepal, flooding rivers and submerging villages and farmland, officials said.
The rains have subsided and waters begun receding in most of the worst-hit regions with the storms moving to the west, hitting other parts of India and Pakistan.
Karachi, in Pakistan, was lashed by heavy winds and rains Friday that destroyed houses, flooded streets and killed at least 22 people, officials. It was the worst storm to hit southern Pakistan since June, when more than 200 people died in early monsoon rains in Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital.
Vital to farmers whose crops feed hundreds of millions of people, the monsoon season runs from June to September as the rains work their way across the subcontinent. It’s a blessing and a curse for the subcontinent — last year more than 1,000 people died.
Since the start of this year’s monsoon, more than 1,550 people have died in India; 226 people have been killed neighboring Bangladesh; 92 in Nepal, and at least 222 in Pakistan, officials said.
In many areas, the rains have left behind pools of stagnant water that international aid groups warned Friday could easily become breeding ground for waterborne diseases.
Children, who make up 40 percent of South Asia’s population, were particularly vulnerable, said UNICEF.
Doctors have in the past 10 days treated more than 1,500 people for diarrhea caused by contaminated drinking water in 22 flood-hit districts, said L.B. Prasad, director-general of government health services in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
He added that 2,000 medical camps have been set up in the state.
Nongovernment groups said the scope of the suffering was greater, with the Uttar Pradesh Voluntary Health Association putting the number of people suffering from waterborne diseases in the state at around 20,000.
“Paramedics visiting affected villages don’t have adequate supplies of medicines,” said Ramakant Rai, chief of the association. He said there was also an acute shortage of clean drinking water.
Nearly 243,000 people were still living in nearly 1,100 state-run relief camps in India, the federal Home Ministry said in a statement.
In the neighboring state of Bihar, there were hundreds of reports of people being infected with a variety of ailments, although officials offered no exact figures.
They did, however, cancel vacations for doctors in 19 flood-ravaged districts, said state Health Minister Chandramohan Rai.
Banks in the state also temporarily suspended recovery of loans from people who had been affected by the flooding.
Several million children in Bihar were unable to go to school because their schools had been damaged or were being used as shelters, UNICEF said.
Meanwhile, the monsoon rains that flood wide stretches of the subcontinent each year force creatures large and small, harmless and deadly, onto whatever dry land can be found, and the result is scores, if not hundreds, of fatal snakebites, say officials and experts.
“Everything, everyone, is restricted to tiny, tiny islands with very little space,” said Romulus Whitaker, a snake expert.
“Everyone is crammed in together and the chances of running into snakes, stepping on them, grabbing them and sleeping on them is much, much more.”
So tight is the association of snakes with the annual rains — which are needed to water farms that provide a livelihood for two-thirds of India’s 1.1 billion people — that the serpents have for millennia been revered as well as feared across much of the subcontinent.
With this year’s monsoon particularly calamitous, tales of snakebites abound, from the farming villages along the banks of Ganges River to the valleys of India’s remote northeast.
