India’s Remote Northeast Devastated by Flooding

The flooded Brahmaputra River has cut a vicious swath through India’s remote northeast, killing hundreds of people, leveling homes, washing away schools and leaving millions of people homeless.

Arun Kalita’s village, Sootea, in Assam state, was swept away, and he and his wife and four children now live in a tarpaulin-roofed riverbank shelter, depending on government handouts to stave off their hunger.

“We just kept watching from a distance and could do nothing,” said Kalita, 57, his voice choked with emotion.

But Kalita is one of the lucky ones--he and his family survived. Annual monsoon flooding has killed more than 900 people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal since June and displaced or surrounded about 25 million more.

Some of the most isolated victims are here in Assam, along the rugged foothills of the Himalayas.

After two weeks of destruction, the rains have slowed and the flood waters have started receding in much of the province. But the monsoon-driven weather remains unpredictable.

In all, monsoon floods have killed at least 323 people in India, according to official estimates. In neighboring Bangladesh, 157 have died.

The highest death toll has been in the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, where at least 424 people have either been swept away by flood waters or crushed under mudslides in remote mountain villages.

It’s the same story for thousands of villages along the Brahmaputra, which originates in China’s Tibet region as the Yarlung, flows down nearly 500 miles across the Assam plains and into Bangladesh before spilling into the Bay of Bengal.

Flooding and landslides triggered by heavy rains also have killed 108 people over the last 10 days in the southeastern Chinese province of Hunan, the official News China News Agency said Thursday.

Rains that started Aug. 5 have wrecked railways and highways in Hunan, a densely populated farming area, it said.