People wade through floodwaters in Feni, Bangladesh on August 24, 2024. | Photo credit: Reuters
Nearly 300,000 Bangladeshis were taking refuge in emergency shelters on Saturday to escape floods that hit low-lying areas across the South Asian country, disaster officials said.
Heavy monsoon rains have caused flooding and killed at least 42 people in Bangladesh and India since earlier this week, many of them in landslides.
“My house is completely submerged,” Lufton Nahar, 60, told AFP from a relief shelter in Feni, one of the worst-hit districts bordering India’s Tripura state.
“The water is flowing above our roof. My brother brought us here by boat. If he had not come, we would have died.”
The country of 170 million is crossed by hundreds of rivers and has been frequently flooded in recent decades.
Monsoon rains cause massive destruction every year but climate change is altering weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.
Highways and rail lines between the capital Dhaka and the main port city of Chittagong were damaged, making access to badly flooded districts difficult and disrupting business activity.
The floods come just weeks after a student-led revolution toppled Bangladesh’s government.
Among the worst-affected areas is Cox’s Bazar, home to nearly one million Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Myanmar.
Tripura State Disaster Agency official Sarat Kumar Das told AFP that 24 people had been killed on the Indian border since Monday.
Eighteen other people were killed in Bangladesh, according to Disaster Management Ministry secretary Mohammad Kamrul Hasan.
“285,000 people are living in emergency shelters,” he said, adding that 4.5 million people in total had been affected.
Recovery from turbulence
When the floods struck, Bangladesh was recovering from weeks of civil unrest that culminated in the ouster of autocratic former leader Sheikh Hasina on Aug. 5.
The interim government led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus is still trying to find its footing, and ordinary Bangladeshis are raising money for relief efforts.
They have been organised by the same students who led the protests that led to the ouster of Hasina, who is living in India after fleeing Dhaka.
A large number of people turned up at Dhaka University on Friday to donate cash, while students loaded sacks of rice and baskets of bottled water into vehicles for flood-hit areas.
Much of Bangladesh is made up of deltas where the great Himalayan rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, flow to the sea after flowing through India.
Many tributaries of both international rivers are still in spate.
However, as per the forecast, rainfall is likely to reduce in the coming days.
‘Creating a flood’
India was Hasina’s biggest patron and benefactor and since then many Bangladeshis have openly criticised their bigger and more powerful neighbour for supporting her 15-year rule.
Student protest leader Asif Mahmood, who is now part of Yunus’ caretaker Cabinet, on Wednesday accused India of “creating floods” by deliberately releasing water from dams.
Hundreds of people gathered at Dhaka University on Friday to protest against India’s “water invasion”, where a banner showed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi cheering on drowning people.
India’s foreign ministry has rejected the charge, saying its own catchment area had received “the heaviest rainfall this year” this week and that the flow of water downstream was due to “automatic releases”.
The impact of floods remains severe in the Indian state of Tripura, where around 65,000 people are taking shelter in 450 relief camps, according to local media reports.