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500 000 displaced by flooding
16/06/2006 10:46 - (SA)
Gauhati - Severe flooding caused by heavy monsoon rains has displaced more than 500 000 people in India's northeast and left thousands more stranded as road and rail links were washed away, officials said on Friday.
About 800 villages have been submerged just in the state of Assam, where seven people have died since the rains hit in early June, according to a report from the Assam state government.
Five more people have died in nearby Tripura state. There were no immediate figures available for the number of people displaced in Tripura.
The Assam government has set up temporary relief camps, supplying many of the homeless with shelter and basic food, while other people have taken refuge in other villages on higher ground.
However, relief efforts have been hampered as floods and mudslides washed away crucial road and rail links, which could take up to a week to restore, said T Rabha, a spokesperson for the Indian railways.
"More than 2 000 workers are engaged in clearing and restoring the tracks," said Rabha.
The flooding also cut off crucial supplies to the remote, landlocked states of Mizoram, Manipur and Tripura in the northeast - a region wedged between China, Myanmar and Bangladesh and connected to the rest of India by a small sliver of land.
That narrow link was severed when rain and mudslides blocked road and rail links, said Gautam Ganguly, a government official.
Hundreds of trucks filled with food and essentials were lined up on Friday waiting for the road to reopen.
More than 120 people have been killed in India since the monsoon began working its way up the subcontinent on May 25, arriving a week before it was expected. The monsoon season ends in October.
The Brahmaputra, one of Asia's largest rivers, flows 1 200 kilometres across Assam state before emptying into the Bay of Bengal, flooding hundreds of villages across the state since the monsoon hit the northeast in early June.
- AP
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