Death Toll in South Asia Floods Nearly 900

GAUHATI, India – Floodwaters poured into the capital of a remote northeastern Indian state and mudslides swept through a Nepalese village as the death toll from two months of torrential monsoon rains rose to nearly 900 in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, officials said Wednesday.

Two people were swept away Tuesday night by floodwaters in Thoubal Ningombam, a village 20 miles southwest of Imphal, the capital of Manipur state. Parts of the capital were under water, forcing schools and businesses to close, said Bimal Chandra, the director-general of police. Police have recovered one body.

In Nepal, landslides killed a 60-year-old man and a 55-year-old woman on Tuesday in Phulpinkot, 50 miles northeast of the capital, Katmandu, the Interior Ministry said.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies asked international donors for $1.7 million in immediate aid for the victims in Nepal and $1.9 million for those in India, as emergency relief supplies have been exhausted.

In India, army and paramilitary soldiers joined rescue efforts in Manipur state, where the floods are the worst in three decades.

Nearly 1 million people in 200 towns and villages have either lost their homes or moved to higher ground to escape the fury of six major rivers, which have breached mud embankments at 40 places, said Shantikumar Singh, the head of the state flood control department.

Manipur has a population of 1.8 million people. On Wednesday, the state was cut off from the rest of India as mudslides blocked highways at several places, Singh said.

In the district of Makwanpur in Nepal, 100 miles southwest of Katmandu, where landslides killed at least 50 people last month, diarrhea and typhoid have reached epidemic proportions, The Kathmandu Post newspaper reported Wednesday.

The carcasses of dead cattle contaminating rivers and streams may have caused the diseases, the newspaper quoted Kakada village council chairman Govind Praja as saying. Health officials were distributing water purification tablets.

As many as 424 people have been killed and 250,000 more injured in Nepal in the flooding, officials said.

In neighboring Bangladesh, water levels of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Jamuna rivers that had receded last week began rising again Wednesday following fresh downpours in the country's northern region, the Flood Forecasting and Warning Center in Dhaka said.

Monsoon floods have killed at least 157 people and displaced more than 6 million others in Bangladesh, a delta nation of 130 million people. It is the worst flooding in the country in four years.

In the eastern Indian state of Bihar, wedged between Nepal and Bangladesh, army soldiers in motor boats were helping to evacuate thousands of villagers whose mud and thatch huts were washed away by raging floodwaters, officials said Wednesday.

Dozens of prisoners had to be moved as floodwaters of the Gandak River entered the district jail in Bihar's Khagariya district, 90 miles northeast of Patna, the state capital, police said.

Rising rivers had submerged railroad tracks near Samastipur, 95 miles northeast of the state capital, Patna, halting rail traffic for a large swath of northeastern Bihar state, said Shambu Saran Singh, a relief and rehabilitation ministry official.

He said the death toll in the state had climbed to 265 people since June. Thirty-nine people have died in neighboring Assam state.

Floods have displaced or trapped more than 15 million people in the two states, home to some 100 million people.