Vatican City: Pope Francis on August 27 offered prayers for the victims of massive flooding in Bangladesh, Nepal, and northern India.
“I express my closeness to all the [affected] populations, and pray for the victims and for all who suffer because of this calamity,” Pope Francis said.
The Pope was speaking to pilgrims and tourists gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the traditional Sunday Angelus prayer, Vatican Radio reported.
All three countries suffer frequent flooding during the June-September monsoon season, but international aid agencies say things are worse this year with thousands of villages cut off and people deprived of food and clean water for days, report agencies.
Government officials in India’s eastern state of Bihar told Reuters news agency on August 25 that at least 379 people had been killed over the past few days, with thousands sheltered in relief camps away from their inundated homes.
“This year farming has collapsed due to floods and we will witness a sharp rise in unemployment,” said Anirudh Kumar, a disaster management official in Patna – the capital of poor Bihar state known for mass migration to cities in search of jobs.
In neighboring Uttar Pradesh, at least 88 people were killed when floods swamped nearly half of the vast state of 220 million people.
Rajan Kumar, a federal interior ministry official in New Delhi overseeing the rescue and relief operations, told Reuters news agency that at least 850 people had been killed in six flood-affected states in the past month.
“A second wave of floods led to widespread destruction,” he said. “We will have to provide immediate rehabilitation aid to help millions affected directly.”
In Nepal, 150 people have been killed and 90,000 homes destroyed in what the United Nations is calling the worst flooding there in a decade.
In Bangladesh, at least 134 people have died and more than 5.7 million been affected directly as monsoon flooding submerged more than a third of the low-lying and densely populated country.
Crops on 10,583 hectares of land have been washed away while another 600,587 hectares of farmland have been partially damaged, according to the disaster ministry, in a big blow to the farm-dependent country which lost around one million tons of rice in flash floods in April.
“I could not find a single dry patch of land,” said Matthew Marek, the head of disaster response in Bangladesh for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent, who made an aerial assessment of the worst affected parts of the country.
“Farmers are left with nothing, not even with clean drinking water.”
Annual monsoon rains have caused the flooding, which has claimed more than 1,200 lives in and disrupted the lives of some 24 million others in the South Asian countries.
As thousands of villages remain cut off international aid agencies have joined rescue and relief efforts.
People in remote and isolated areas have been without food and clean water for many days.