Savage South Asia Floods Pack Hospitals

Hospitals in eastern India were packed on Saturday with people suffering from waterborne diseases, and marooned villagers clashed with police as some of the worst floods in living memory ravaged South Asia.

More than 230 people have died over the past 11 days after torrential monsoon rains lashed the region, including much of Bangladesh, causing rivers to burst their banks.

About 10 million people are homeless or cut off in their villages, with little or no access to food and health care.

Health workers and aid groups in Assam in northeast India were working around the clock to treat and feed many of the 3 million people displaced or surrounded by flood waters in the state with the limited medicines and supplies available.

Elsewhere, villagers were getting desperate and hungry.

"Our family survived for a week on buffalo milk but now the animal has stopped producing milk as it has gone without food for days," said Meghu Yadav, a villager in the Samastipur district of impoverished Bihar state.

Many people were suffering from diarrhoea, dysentery and fever, and in Assam hospital wards in affected areas were full.

Officials have warned of outbreaks of malaria. On Friday the United Nations Children's Fund said the scale of the disaster posed an "unprecedented challenge" for aid workers.

"The victims are left to survive on their own," an aid worker with an Indian voluntary agency that is supervising relief work in Assam told Reuters in Guwahati, the state's main city.

Although it had stopped raining in the state on Saturday, further downpours were forecast for early next week.

And for many farmers the end of the floods is only the beginning of their misery: receding water has left a thick layer of silt over thousands of hectares of land and no new rice crop will be possible until next year.

ANGER FLARES

Every year monsoon rains leave a trail of death and destruction across South Asia, but much of the economy of a largely agricultural region depends on the downpours.

In Bihar, where 10 million people have been hit, thousands of hungry villagers forced from their homes staged angry protests after one villager was killed and more than 20 injured in overnight clashes with police, officials and witnesses said.

The violence flared in the state's flood-hit Madhubani district late on Friday when police tried to move the displaced from elevated train tracks where they had taken refuge, in order to dig a ditch and drain floodwaters from a nearby village.

Police opened fire, killing one villager, witnesses said. The NDTV news channel reported officers had been pelted with stones.

More than 35 million people have been affected in South Asia, with 7 million marooned in Bangladesh.

Sixteen more people, including six children, drowned overnight taking that country's death toll to at least 81, an official at the government's flood monitoring cell said.

"We have been virtually starving for several days but there seems to be no one to come to help us," said Majeda Begum, perched on the roof of her house in Manikganj district with her five-year-old granddaughter, just above the swirling floodwaters.

The floods have spread to 41 of Bangladesh's 64 districts.

In the Shibalaya area of Manikganj, about 170 km (105 miles) north of the capital, Dhaka, reporters saw Muslim villagers offering prayers on boats as mosques had been flooded.

Parts of Dhaka were under water and more areas might flood in the next few days, officials said.

In Nepal, a United Nations body said incessant rains over the last few weeks had triggered floods and landslides in both the west and east that had killed 84 people and affected 270,000, citing government statistics.

The army and rafting companies -- used to shipping thrill-seeking tourists over rapids -- had joined rescue operations, the U.N. said in a statement.