To higher ground: A family carrying their belongings on a banana raft at the flood affected Mayong village in Morigaon district. — AFP
At least six people have been killed in floods precipitated by torrential rains across northeast India and neighbouring Bangladesh that inundated the homes of more than a million others, officials said.
Monsoon rains cause widespread destruction every year, but experts say climate change is shifting weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.
Disaster authorities in India’s northeastern state of Assam said four people had died over the past day, bringing the number of people killed there over successive downpours since mid-May to 38.
In Bangladesh, landslides triggered by heavy monsoon rains killed two people including a Rohingya refugee early yesterday, said police commander Jahirul Hoque Bhuiyan.
Bhuiyan said authorities in Bangladesh’s vast relief camps – home to around a million Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Myanmar – had relocated some inhabitants to safety.
The worst flooding took place in northeastern Sylhet division, where top government bureaucrat Abu Ahmed Siddique said more than 1.3 million people had been affected.
“Their villages and roads and most of their homes have been inundated by flood water,” said Abu Ahmed Siddique, the government administrator of Sylhet region.
Kamrul Hasan, the secretary of Bangladesh’s disaster management ministry, said that rivers had swelled after rain upstream in India.
Much of low-lying Bangladesh is made up of deltas as the Himalayan rivers of the Ganges and Brahmaputra slowly wind towards the sea after coursing through India.
A major portion of the Kaziranga national park, a Unesco world heritage site and home to the highest number of one-horned rhinos in the world, has also been flooded.
“Forest guards have been put on alert,” said park official Arun Vignesh. — AFP
