AFP – Six people have been killed in floods precipitated by torrential rains across northeast India and neighbouring Bangladesh that inundated the homes of more than a million others, officials said yesterday.
Monsoon rains cause widespread destruction every year, but experts said climate change is shifting weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.
Disaster authorities in India’s northeastern state of Assam said four people had died over the past day, bringing the number of people killed there over successive downpours since mid-May to 38. In Bangladesh, landslides triggered by heavy monsoon rains killed two people including a Rohingya refugee early yesterday, police commander Jahirul Hoque Bhuiyan told AFP.
Bhuiyan said authorities in Bangladesh’s vast relief camps – home to around a million Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Myanmar – had relocated some inhabitants to safety.
The worst flooding took place in northeastern Sylhet division, where top government bureaucrat Abu Ahmed Siddique said more than 1.3 million people had been affected.
