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.

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.