Fresh floods caused by renewed monsoon rainfall in India's eastern state of Orissa have displaced more than 1.5 million people from their homes and damaged about 240,072 hectares of farm land.

Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has said global food aid given on time and directly to people suffering from malnutrition and hunger could yield better results. "Food aid has to be provided on time directly to those suffering from hunger in order to ensure better results," FAO Senior Economist Terri Raney told PTI here.

At least one million people have lost their homes to floods in eastern India, but government relief is slow and inadequate, voluntary groups said today. The flooding, triggered by annual monsoon rains over the past week, has hit an area where 2.3 million people live and damaged thousands of acres of paddy in the coastal state of Orissa.

Authorities in the eastern Indian state of Orissa are struggling to get relief to hundreds of thousands of people who have been stranded after floods submerged their homes, officials said today.

Indian rescue workers persisted with efforts on Thursday to reach hundreds of thousands of people stranded by days of flooding, but as water levels receded in some regions, officials warned of the risk of disease.

Rescuers in India stepped up efforts on Sunday to help hundreds of thousands of people forced from their homes by floods in a southern state as torrential rain hit the country's financial capital.

A widow in Orissa's Jajpur district died of starvation after remaining bedridden for several days, a village leader said Thursday. Seventy-two years of age, Kolhanai Bewa, died at her village Mahisara last Tuesday after she did not get sufficient food to survive, local village council Chief Sudharsan Behera said. She was without food for three days before her death, he said.

Floods caused by summer monsoon rains displaced about 66,000 people in India’s northeast, while heavy rains disrupted traffic in eastern India, officials said on Friday.

Earlier this month, the UN's children's agency, Unicef, said that 57 million of the world's 146 million malnourished children under the age of 5 were in India, by far the largest share of any nation.

A Unicef report says India has the highest number of malnourished children in the world: One in three of the world's malnourished children is Indian. Of the world's 146 million malnourished children, 57 million are in India; they are 47 per cent of under-fives in the country.

India accounts for 57 million of the world's 146 million malnourished children. It has the same rate of malnutrition as Ethiopia (47 per cent) and Nepal and Bangladesh (48 per cent). This is in stark contrast with the figures for China (eight per cent), Thailand (18) and even Afghanistan (39), according to a global report released by the United Nations Children's Fund here on Wednesday.

Hundreds of angry demonstrators blocked traffic for hours Saturday to demand restoration of drinking water and electricity and clearing of rotting animal carcasses after this week's monsoon rains in western India. Officials said the death toll could reach 1,000.

Flash floods and landslides triggered by heavy monsoon rains in India's northeast have left at least 10,000 people displaced in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, officials said Thursday.

Devastating floods in the western Indian state of Gujarat have killed at least 132 people and affected 25 million.

A population of 57,000 in Arunachal Pradesh's East Kameng district faced certain starvation with no rice supplies from Food Corporation of India (FCI), it was officially stated today.

When she began planning the Interfaith Hunger Convocation six months ago, North Texas Food Bank CEO Jan Pruitt wondered whether it could even be organized without offending someone. She soon discovered that Christians, Jews, Hindus and Muslims can agree on at least one thing: Fighting hunger is a holy undertaking. "We're more alike than we're different," Pruitt said. "There's a lot of commonness in what each religion tries to do, especially around the poor."

In all, an estimated one billion people - or one in five people in the developing world - still live below the extreme poverty line. Prospects were significantly brighter in Asia where economic growth in the world's most populous countries, China and India, helped reduce the number of people in extreme poverty by 250 million from 1990 to 2001.

A recent Unicef 2005 report on the state of the world’s children under the title “Childhood Under Threat” says that over one billion children, half of the world’s population of children, have been denied their childhood. It is reported that some 640 million children lack adequate shelter; 400 million have no access to safe drinking water; 270 million lack health care amenities and 140 million — mostly girls — have never been to school. It was earlier reported that more than 150 million children are malnourished worldwide.

Two months ago, the international community launched the world's biggest humanitarian operation in response to the December 26 tsunami, which killed close to 290,000 people in the Indian Ocean. The mammoth aid effort helped prevent tens of thousands of more lives being lost to hunger and disease.

Little Surendra Majhi doesn't quite know what home is. Nobody, it seems, wants to give him shelter for very long. He was only a year old when seven members of his family, including his mother, died in the infamous mango kernel starvation deaths in southern Orissa Nov 13, 2001. Since then he has been shunted back and forth from his home to orphanages.