India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam affected
Possibly because extreme weather conditions are becoming the new normal, the devastation caused by days of torrential downpour across large parts of the country has gone largely unnoticed. Yet, the numbers are overwhelming. At least a 180 people have died and more than a million people have now fled their homes and moved into refugee camps. The situation is improving slightly in the west as the flood waters have receded in Gujarat and Rajasthan, where 72 and 35 persons have lost their lives respectively. In the north, there have been no reports of casualties from Jammu & Kashmir even though Kupwara and leh were badly hit by flash floods on Monday.
For West Bengal, Manipur and Odisha however, there is no respite. Thousands of villages are marooned; roads, bridges and highways flooded; cell phone towers, phone lines and electricity cables mostly damaged. It has become next to impossible for state authorities to reach out to the affected with food and aid. In some locations, the Army has been in called in to conduct rescue operations while the disaster management teams are also doing their bit. But the problem is not just the number of people who have lost their lives or the amount of property that has been damaged or even the inevitable threats to public health from contaminated food and water.
The bigger concern is that such incidents have almost become an annual feature. last year, floods ravaged Jammu & Kashmir, killing 280 people. Several months later, the State is yet to recover and rebuild itself. In 2013, a multi-day cloudburst caused floods and landslides across Uttarakhand that killed an estimated 6,000 people (though unofficial estimates are more than double that number) — it was the country's worst natural disaster since the 2004 tsunami. This year too there have been severe floods in Uttarakhand prompting the Government to airlift at least a few hundred pilgrims from Badrinath and Hemkund Sahib.
Notably, it is not just India that has been affected but much of south and south-east Asia that has been suffering such torrential rains, flash floods and landslides. The monsoon depression that became last week's tropical cyclone Komen and lashed against West Bengal and Manipur also had a debilitating impact on Bangladesh and Myanmar. Thankfully, the situation has somewhat stabilised in Bangladesh but Myanmar is in the midst of national crisis.
The Government there has declared an emergency in the western States that are the worst-affected and also requested international aid. On Tuesday, the death toll was pegged at 46 and this is only a conservative estimate. last week, similar scenes were also witnessed in northern Vietnam where heavy rains and floodwaters claimed at least 17 lives, submerged entire villages, ruined some 4,000 hectares of rice and other crops and threatened the country's beautiful Ha long Bay, a world heritage site famous for its limestone islands.