Late monsoon fury kills 113 in north India
LUCKNOW, India: Heavy rains have killed at least 113 people in India’s Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states over the past three days, officials said yesterday, as floodwaters swamped a major city, inundated hospital wards and forced the evacuation of inmates from a jail. India’s monsoon season that begins in June usually starts to retreat by early September, but heavy rains have continued across parts of the country this year, triggering floods.
An official said that at least 93 people had died in most populous Uttar Pradesh since Friday after its eastern areas were lashed by intense monsoon showers. Rising water levels forced authorities to shift 900 inmates from a prison in eastern Ballia district, police officer Santosh Verma said. In neighboring Bihar, an impoverished agrarian region that was hit by floods earlier this year, the death toll from the latest bout of rain had reached 20 yesterday, a state government official said.
Bihar’s capital city of Patna, home to around 2 million, has been badly hit, with waist-deep flood waters across many streets, and entering homes, shops, and even the wards of a major hospital. In some parts, authorities deployed boats to rescue residents.
“The rains have stopped but there is waterlogging in many areas,” Bihar’s Additional Secretary in the Disaster Relief Department Amod Kumar Sharan said.
“Patna alone has recorded some 226 millimetres (8.9 inches) of rainfall since Friday,” Bihar disaster response official M Ramachandru told AFP. Photos showed patients lying on hospital beds in dirty rainwater at the state-run Nalanda Medical College and Hospital in Patna. It has also been raining heavily in southern India and in the western state of Gujarat.
With the Indian Meteorological Department yesterday predicting excess rainfall across 15 states, this year’s monsoon will end as the wettest since 1917, the mass-circulation Times of India said. “There are no signs of withdrawal for at least four-five days,” senior IMD officer Mrutyunjay Mohapatra told the daily. The monsoon, which is vital for farmers across the South Asian region, killed some 650 people in India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan in July this year. In its bulletin yesterday, IMD added the intensity of rainfall over Bihar was very likely to reduce. Showers in Uttar Pradesh are also expected to abate this week. —Agencies