India floods leave 2.5M homeless, 250 dead

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-10-05 21:53

A farmer gathers paddy crops after a heavy rain shower at a grain market in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh October 4, 2009. [Agencies]

HYDERABAD, India: About 2.5 million people crammed into temporary relief shelters after floods triggered by torrential rains tore down their homes in southern India over the last week and killed some 250 people, officials said on Monday.

Most of the deaths were reported from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh state where rivers topped or breached their embankments. Some deaths occurred in the western Maharashtra state.

The flooding, described by officials as worst in many decades in south India, swamped millions of acres of cropland, including sugarcane plantations, prompting worries of a fall in sugar output in Karnataka, the country's third-biggest producer.

Officials and relief agencies said more than five million people had been affected by the flooding and were now sheltered in over 1,200 temporary camps. They included about 2.5 million people from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh who lost their homes.

"These are the worst floods in 100 years," said Dharmana Prasada Rao, Andhra Pradesh's minister for revenue and relief.

H.V. Parashwanath, a Karnataka disaster management official overseeing relief operations, told Reuters that some two million people had been made homeless in the state.

Sonia Gandhi, the head of India's ruling Congress party, and federal Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram inspected the devastation.

Relief officials used helicopters and boats to drop off rations and plastic sheets to hundreds of marooned villagers in the two states.

While rains had subsided in Karnataka, overflowing rivers and dams in Andhra Pradesh threatened to inundate Vijayawada, a city about a million people and an important trading centre.

Authorities used hundreds of thousands of sandbags to fortify weakening embankments and evacuated more than 200,000 people living close to the Krishna river.

Officials said vast areas of agricultural land, including sugarcane and paddy fields, were under water in the state.

"About two-thirds of the 54 sugar mills in the state have been forced to delay crushing by a week to 10 days as cane fields are submerged," Govind Reddy, a secretary of the Southern Indian Sugar Mills Association, told Reuters over phone from Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka.

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