Indian flood victims face months in camps

JANKINAGAR, India (AP) -- Soldiers and aid workers pressed efforts Wednesday to rescue hundreds of thousands of people still stranded after weeks of flooding in northern India, as those safe on dry land settled in at camps that will likely house them for months.

The three refugee camps housing 7,000 people in Jankinagar town -- one near a train station, the other two in schools -- had an air of semi-permanence Wednesday as women washed clothes and other people set up stalls to sell cigarettes.

In other parts of the flood-ravaged northern state of Bihar, thousands of soldiers and aid workers continued to try to save those still stranded on rooftops, trees and specks of dry land more than two weeks after monsoon rains caused the Kosi River to burst its banks and turn hundreds of square miles (hundreds of square meters) of Bihar into a giant lake.

Officials say more than half of the 1.2 million people stranded have been rescued. They have only confirmed 38 deaths, but it's widely believed the final toll will be significantly higher.

The situation was slowly beginning to improve with the Kosi River cutting new channels and water draining into the Ganges River, which cuts across the subcontinent, but authorities have cautioned that many areas would likely remain flooded until the monsoon rains taper off in November. This means survivors will likely be stuck in relief camps for the next few months.

"How can I go back? The houses are gone, everything is gone," said Kakhrun Lal, a 65-year-old who watched four of his cows -- his most valuable possessions -- drown in the flooding. He sold the other two so his family could have a little money. But when that runs out, he will have nothing.

So for the time being he is living at one of Jankinagar's camps, where he was getting two meals a day. On Wednesday morning, it was flattened rice topped with cane sugar syrup. Most people were eating off mats sewn together from scraps of clothing.

A meager meal for sure, but food nonetheless. Watch the extent of the flooding »

"We usually get a meal in the evening. Sometimes it doesn't come until 2 a.m. During the day if we get [food] we're happy," Lal said.

Lal's two sons, meanwhile, have joined the mass exodus of younger people, who are crowding trains to leave the ravaged state in search of jobs in India's more prosperous big cities, such as New Delhi and Mumbai.

The relief effort was the first to deploy all three branches of India's military -- the army, navy and air force, said Prataya Amrit, a top disaster management official in Bihar.

While many of the flood refugees were staying with friends or family, Amrit said about 275,000 of those evacuated were living in some the 250 relief camps set up across the state.

But there is not enough room for everyone, and crowds of frustrated people made homeless by the floods have attacked government offices in recent days. There have also been reports of looting.

With the numbers in the camps for the displaced expected to nearly double in the coming days, there were fears that crowded and unsanitary conditions could lead to outbreaks of diseases such as cholera.

At the camps in Jankinagar there were already cases of dysentery, diarrhea, vomiting, fever and eye infections, said A. Alam, a doctor volunteering at a camp.

In the northeastern state of Assam, monsoon floods have also submerged roughly 1,500 villages, drowning 15 people and displacing hundreds of thousands, the state's Relief and Rehabilitation Minister Bhumidhar Barman said Tuesday.

Two of Assam's major rivers, the Brahmaputra and the Barak, are flowing above the danger levels at more than a dozen places in different parts of the state, according to a bulletin issued by the Central Water Commission, a federal flood-monitoring agency.

The flood waters have also submerged large parts of two main forest sanctuaries that are home to the rare one-horned rhinoceros in that area, state government officials have said.

The monsoon season, which starts in June, brings rain vital for the farmers of South Asia but also can cause widespread destruction.

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