Indian relief workers scramble to provide aid to desperate flood victims

Bihar: Hungry villagers began to riot and desperate families swam for their lives as Indian troops and aid workers scrambled to reach hundreds of thousands of stranded flood victims on Tuesday in one of the country's largest relief efforts.

Nearly half of the 1.2 million people left homeless when the Kosi River burst its banks in Nepal two weeks ago, spilling over north India's vast plains, had been rescued by Tuesday, said Prataya Amrit, a top disaster management official in Bihar state. Officials hoped to reach the rest in the next two days.

The massive relief effort was the first to deploy all three branches of India's military — the army, the navy, and the air force, Amrit said.

Despite stepped up relief efforts, new areas flooded and yet more villages were cut off. Stranded victims waded through neck-deep waters to reach safety.

Unicef and European Union aid workers joined in the operation as much as possible.

Relief centres have been set up across the region and thousands of people seeking refuge crammed into the buildings, with numbers expected to nearly double in the coming days.

The United Nations warned "the heat, combined with limited supplies of safe drinking water and poor hygiene conditions, poses a great risk of water- and vector-borne diseases."

Officials say the flooding is expected to continue until November when the last of the monsoon rains taper off. Only then will they be able to plug the breach in the Kosi River that is more than a kilometre wide and growing.

An official death toll has not been released, but estimates range from scores to thousands.