Individuals stroll via flood waters in Feni, Bangladesh, August 24, 2024. | Photograph credit score: Reuters
Practically 300,000 Bangladeshis took refuge in emergency shelters on Saturday as floods inundated huge areas of the South Asian nation, catastrophe officers stated.
The floods had been triggered by heavy monsoon rains and have killed a minimum of 42 individuals in Bangladesh and India because the begin of the week, lots of them in landslides.
“My home is totally flooded,” Lufton Nahar, 60, advised AFP from a shelter in Feni, one of many worst-affected districts close to the border with the Indian state of Tripura.
“The water is coming over our roof. My brother introduced us right here by boat. If he hadn’t, we might have died.”
The nation of 170 million individuals is crisscrossed by a whole lot of rivers and has suffered frequent flooding in current many years.
Monsoon rains trigger widespread destruction yearly, however local weather change is altering climate patterns and rising the variety of excessive climate occasions.
Roads and rail strains had been broken between the capital Dhaka and the principle port metropolis of Chittagong, hampering entry to severely flooded districts and disrupting industrial exercise.
The floods additionally come simply weeks after a student-led revolution toppled Bangladesh’s authorities.
Among the many worst-affected areas is Cox’s Bazar, a district that’s residence to round 1,000,000 Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Myanmar.
Sarat Kumad Das, an official with Tripura state’s catastrophe company, advised AFP that 24 individuals had died on the Indian facet of the border since Monday.
One other 18 individuals died in Bangladesh, in line with Md Kamrul Hasan, secretary of the Ministry of Catastrophe Administration.
“285,000 persons are residing in emergency shelters,” he stated, including {that a} complete of 4.5 million individuals have been affected.
Recovering from the riots
When the floods struck, Bangladesh was recovering from weeks of civil unrest that culminated within the ouster of former autocratic chief Sheikh Hasina on August 5.
Whereas an interim authorities led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus continues to be discovering its ft, extraordinary Bangladeshis have been collectively elevating funds to assist.
They had been organised by the identical college students who led the protests that led to the ouster of Hasina, who stays in India after fleeing Dhaka.
A crowd descended on Dhaka College on Friday to supply money donations as college students loaded sacks of rice and containers of bottled water onto automobiles for areas hit by the deluge.
A lot of Bangladesh is made up of deltas the place the nice Himalayan rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, meander in the direction of the ocean after passing via India.
A number of tributaries of the 2 transnational rivers remained overflowing.
Nonetheless, forecasts indicated that the rains had been prone to lower within the coming days.
‘Making a flood’
India was Hasina’s principal backer and benefactor and plenty of Bangladeshis have since overtly criticised their bigger and extra highly effective neighbour for backing her 15-year rule.
Asif Mahmud, a scholar protest chief who now sits in Yunus’s interim cupboard, accused India on Wednesday of “making a flood” by intentionally releasing water from dams.
Lots of of individuals additionally gathered at Dhaka College on Friday to protest in opposition to India’s “water aggression,” displaying a banner displaying Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi supposedly taking delight within the sight of individuals drowning.
India’s exterior affairs ministry rejected the allegation, saying its personal catchment space had this week skilled the “heaviest rainfall this yr” and that the circulate of water downstream was resulting from “computerized releases”.
The affect of the floods stays extreme within the Indian state of Tripura, with round 65,000 individuals sheltering in 450 aid camps, in line with native media reviews.
