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.
Rains since the past few days have affected about 4,000 villages in 12 districts in Orissa, Manmohan Samal, revenue minister of the state, said in a phone interview from state capital Bhubaneswar. About 366 villages continued to be marooned and more than 47,000 houses have been damaged, he said.
Hundreds of villages and some towns, mainly in the south and west of the country, have been submerged, leaving hundreds of thousands of people marooned, some stranded on rooftops and in trees for days without food and water.
Petroleum, gas and power plants have also been hit and crops have been devastated. One industry lobby group said the cost could exceed 200 billion rupees (US$4.3 billion).
New Delhi, Sept. 15 (PTI): 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.
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.
In southern Andhra Pradesh the death toll from three days of monsoon storms rose to 80, officials said, as 18 people drowned, were electrocuted or killed as houses collapsed overnight.
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 food sufficient food to survive, local village council Chief Sudharsan Behera said. She was without food for three days before her death, he said.
It was a manic Monday for people in Orissa. Seven people were killed and 18, including six fishermen, went missing in the Bay of Bengal off Paradeep in flash floods caused by incessant rains over the past 24 hours.
President A P J Abdul Kalam had to abort his trip to Berhampur.
The Met Department predicted more rains over Orissa and the northern parts of the west coast in the next 24 hours as a consequence of deep depression over the north Bay of Bengal crossing the Orissa coast and stabilising over Cuttack.
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.
In northeastern Assam state, floodwaters from the Brahmaputra River had inundated about 13,000 hectares of land, the state government said.
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.
JAWHAR, India (Reuters) – 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.
Nearly half of Indian under-5s are underweight, it said.
According to official figures, about 1.2 million children under 5 die from malnutrition in India every year.
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.