Doctors rushed to flood-hit areas

Bihar: Indian authorities rushed doctors and medical equipment to flood-devastated northern India on Monday in a bid to ward off outbreaks of disease among the hundreds of thousands of victims crowding into relief camps, officials said.

Nearly half of the 1.2 million people who were left homeless when the Kosi River burst its banks, spilling over north India's vast plains two weeks ago, had been rescued by yesterday, and officials said they hope to reach the others in the next three days.

About 250,000 refugees were in government and relief agency camps, said Prataya Amrit, a top disaster management official in Bihar state, the scene of the flooding. The rest have taken shelter with family or friends.

But with the numbers in the camps expected to nearly double in the coming days, there were fears the crowded and often unsanitary conditions could lead to outbreaks of diseases such as cholera.

Great risk

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

In one camp set up at a school in Saharsa district - one of the worst hit of the five flooded districts in Bihar - a nurse was trying to treat the sick armed with just one packet of paracetamol tablets.

"We have had 35 cases of diarrhea and fever today out of 800 people in the camp," said the nurse, Niru Kumari.

Saharsa is some 1,200 kilometres northeast of New Delhi, India's capital. Amrit, the disaster management official, said the situation would improve greatly in the coming days. "A lot of doctors have been moved and the Health Ministry is mobilising," said Amrit.

"I'm sure it will be worked out in a day or two." Officials from Unicef, the UN agency that focuses on children's' welfare, said the government was doing a good job getting food to the camps and bringing in doctors.

Adequate sanitation

"In some of the mega camps being built there is adequate sanitation, but those are not yet complete," said Mani Kumar, an emergency specialist with the agency. Kumar said the threat remained while people were in overcrowded temporary camps.

"We are monitoring the situation for outbreaks and are ready to rush in," he said. The agency has already distributed more than 500,000 water purification tablets and sachets of rehydration solution to treat diarrhea.

Adding to their troubles, the flood waters continued to rise, inundating some camps and cutting off access to others, particularly in the Supaul district near the border with Nepal. Late Sunday the main road leading to the area was washed away.

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 a breach in the Kosi River that is more than a mile wide and growing.

Rescue operations

The Indian Army could have moved in much earlier in flood-ravaged Bihar to join in the relief and rescue operations, but were made to wait for six crucial days before being given the formal order on August 26, a senior army official has said.

Army troops had begun to move in to Patna on August 20, but were not given the orders to join in the rescue operations for six days - when all the while the waters of the Kosi continued to rise inexorably and swamp more villages in the state.

"The troops were waiting in Patna for the government's order for six days. But in those six days a lot of damage was caused," the army official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"The Bihar government ordered the army deployment after its resident commissioner in Delhi met the cabinet secretary," the official added.

Currently 21 columns of the army, consisting of more than 2,000 personnel, are involved in relief operations and 16 more columns are waiting to be moved. The army has set up three nodal centres under the supervision of three Brigadiers at Danapur, Katihar and Khagaria in Bihar to man the operations.