ISLAMABAD (AP) – More than half of the flood victims in Pakistan’s worst-hit Sindh province have returned to their homes over the past three weeks as the waters there gradually receded, officials said yesterday.
The announcement came as Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif visited the district of Jaccobabad in Sindh, from where he was travelling to the town of Sohbatput in another flood-stricken province, Baluchistan, his office said.
Floodwaters are gradually receding in both provinces and elsewhere in Pakistan, engulfed since mid-June in unprecedented monsoon rains and floods that have killed 1,719 people in the impoverished South Asian country. At one point in August, more than half a million people were living in tents across Pakistan.
The disaster management agency in Sindh said currently a little over 200,000 people are living in relief camps in the province, where the floods have affected 12 million people and killed 780.
The Indus River, which caused much of the devastations in Sindh, is now at normal levels, though authorities say it will take another two months to completely drain the water.
Waterborne diseases and skin infections are spreading in Sindh, where doctors have treated 30,000 people over the past 24 hours, the provincial health department said yesterday.
Nationwide, the floods have affected 33 million people, damaged over two million homes, washed away thousands of kilometres of roads and destroyed 435 bridges. The overall fatalities have included 641 children and 345 women.
Several economists and government officials have said the cost of the disaster may reach USD32 billion.
The United Nations (UN) humanitarian agency said over the weekend that seven million women and children and women require immediate access to food and that around 5.5 million people have no access to safe drinking water.
Around 8.2 million people in flood-affected areas needed urgent health services, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.
The UN in early October raised its call for USD160 million to USD816 million to help with the crisis.
For his part, Sharif has repeatedly asked developed countries – nations that experts said have impacted climate change the most – to scale up aid to his impoverished nation, where authorities say flood survivors will face a harsh winter this December.
