72,000 stranded in Bangladesh floods

DHAKA (AFP) - At least 72,000 people have been marooned by flooding after rivers in northern and central Bangladesh burst their banks, officials said Sunday.

The Flood Forecasting Centre warned that the country's three major rivers - the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna - were all rising fast.

"The Ganges and the Brahmaputra have already crossed danger levels due to heavy rains and the rush of water from India," said the head of the centre, Saiful Hossain, warning more areas would be flooded in the next three days.

Bangladesh is criss-crossed by a network of 230 rivers and suffers annual floods, with at least a fifth of the country submerged each year.

In July and August last year, flooding killed more than 1,000 people and some 40 percent of the country was under water, forcing millions to flee their homes.

Meanwhile, survivors of devastating floods in northeast India said Sunday the rescue operation was failing, accusing the government of abandoning those still stranded in remote villages.

At a makeshift relief camp in the state of Bihar, flood survivors pleaded with officials to send help to relatives they said were marooned on rooftops or in the few areas still above water.

"I left my village 12 days ago when the waters first started to rise. I went out to find food for the cattle and ended up at this camp," said Shivnath Yadav, 70, as tears welled in his eyes.

"I haven't seen my family since. I want to get them out but no boats are going there. I don't know what they are eating, or what they are drinking.

"We need the rescue operation to find our families now. But there are not enough boats."

About 76 people have died since the monsoon-swollen Kosi river breached its banks two weeks ago on India's border with Nepal and changed course, swamping hundreds of villages in impoverished Bihar state.

More than 400,000 people have been evacuated in an operation involving local authorities, emergency workers and the army, disaster management official Pratyaya Amrit told AFP on Sunday.

Another 800,000 people have made their own way out and sought shelter in overcrowded relief centres set up by the government or in concrete buildings and temples, officials in Bihar said, but at least one million remain stranded.

Shrawan Baitha, 28, last spoke to his wife by mobile phone on Saturday, when she told him she was stuck with other family members on their roof in Ratanpatti village, just a few kilometres from the relief camp here.

His wife told him their pregnant niece was experiencing labour pains, but he had been unable to get through on the telephone since.

"They said the water had completely surrounded them," said Baitha, who added that he has run from one local official to another begging for boats to be sent there before it was too late.