Hundreds of thousands stranded as floods hit India and Bangladesh

Floodwaters have inundated parts of India and Bangladesh, stranding hundreds of thousands of people in India’s northeast and neighbouring Bangladesh’s eastern region.

The death toll in Bangladesh, which is still recovering from weeks of political turmoil, had risen to 13 on Friday.

Some 4.5 million people were affected by the floods in eastern Bangladesh, the Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief said.

Soldiers in lifeboats ferried people to safety in India’s northeastern state of Tripura on Friday after heavy rains triggered floods and landslides, forcing more than 65,000 people from their homes and killing at least 23 people, the authorities said.

Television images showed army personnel manning the rescue craft, while cars and buses were marooned in streets of knee-deep water, and disaster management officials said four days of incessant rain had swollen rivers.

The authorities have opened 450 relief camps in Tripura, where about 1.7 million people have been affected, along with extensive damage to infrastructure, crops and livestock.

The rains and the rising waters from upstream Tripura devastated many areas in eastern Bangladesh. Many in the worst-hit districts such as Cumilla, Feni and Noakhali called for rescue as power was cut and road links were disconnected.

Travel and communications were severed between the capital, Dhaka, and the southeastern port city of Chittagong as parts of a major highway were underwater.

While annual monsoon rains in South Asia regularly cause significant destruction, climate change is altering weather patterns and increasing the frequency of extreme weather events.

“It’s a catastrophic situation here,” rescue volunteer Zahed Hossain Bhuiya, 35, told the AFP news agency from Feni. “We are trying to rescue as many people as we can.”

Nur Islam, a shopkeeper in Feni, said his home had been completely submerged.

“Everything is underwater,” the 60-year-old said.

Bangladesh’s disaster management ministry said in a bulletin that the latest toll of 13 deaths included fatalities in cities along the country’s southeastern coast. That included Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar, a district home to about a million Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Myanmar.

Nearly 190,000 others were taken to emergency relief shelters, according to the bulletin.

Political controversy

While both the neighbours have been affected by the floods, many Bangladeshis blamed India, saying it opened a river dam in Tripura, causing sudden floods in Bangladesh.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs denied that in a statement, saying the dam is far from the border and that India had seen the “heaviest rains of this year” this week, and that the flow of water downstream was due to “automatic releases”.

Tripura state’s main river, Gomti, was flowing above the danger mark, government officials said. The Gomti flows through the district of Cumilla in Bangladesh to empty into the Bay of Bengal.

India and Bangladesh share 54 common rivers that flow from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal.