Food Stores Looted by desperate flood victims in India
Pakistan Times Monitoring Desk

PATNA (India): Desperate residents looted food stores Thursday in the flooded eastern Indian town of Darbhanga, while thousands of people perched on the roofs of their sinking homes were lashed by torrential rains, witnesses said.

Power supplies and telecommunications have been snapped by the rising waters, hampering relief efforts for residents trapped without food or drinking water for three days in the town 180 kilometres (112 miles) from the Bihar state capital Patna, officials said.

Hunger Prevails All-over

Hunger drove residents to plunder food grain stores in Darbhanga as relief trickling into the area proved inadequate, the officials said.

A state-run food warehouse was stripped of its stocks while the town administrator's flooded headquarters was also ransacked, they added.

Military helicopters, meanwhile, were air dropping food packets on the town jail where the rising waters have forced inmates to take refuge on the roof.

Jail-Break Attempt

Darbhanga's chief magistrate Pradeep Kumar said 12 inmates overnight fled the complex after water entered their unlocked cells, adding that a second jailbreak attempt on Thursday was thwarted.

An army helicopter trying to pluck students off a medical college roof crashed during a sortie Thursday but there were no casualties, an air force spokesman said.

The Marooned

Some 1,000 students have been stranded on the rain-swept rooftops of the medical college and a town high school without food or drinking water since Tuesday.

"It is a heart-rending scene out there. Schoolchildren, some of them tiny tots, and the medical students just standing, shivering and starving," a soldier involved in relief efforts told television networks, adding that the army did not have enough boats to stage a mass rescue.

Grim Picture

Indian army officers leading contingents of soldiers painted a grim picture of Darbhanga and its adjoining villages, most of them under more than a metre (three feet) of fast-flowing water.

"It is a terrible situation. Yesterday it took us eight hours to move just 25 kilometres (15 miles) inside the inundated areas," said military engineer Mohit, who like many Indians uses only one name.

"We came across areas which are now islands and the people there are without food or medicine. It is horrible," said the army captain, one of the thousands of soldiers deployed in the flood-devastated eastern state of Bihar.

Darbhanga is the headquarters of one of the 16 of Bihar's 38 districts marooned by floodwater, which has completely cut off a third of the province's 3,652 affected villages, stranding 9.4 million people.

Indian copter Crashes

A military helicopter on a mission to rescue people stranded in a flooded eastern Indian town crashed Thursday but there were no casualties, citing official sources a foreign news agency reported.

The helicopter was trying to reach stranded students of a medical college in the flood-hit town of Darbhanga in Bihar state and crashed at around 11:00 pm (0530 GMT) when its tail rotors struck the building, air force spokesman said.

The transport helicopter had already moved to safety 17 female students and had returned to ferry 23 others when the accident occurred, he said. He said the aircraft plunged into water but the pilots were safe.

35 feared drowned as boat sinks in Bihar

At least 35 people were feared drowned Thursday when a boat ferrying villagers fleeing their submerged homes sank in a river in the flood-hit eastern Indian state of Bihar, police and witnesses said.

The boat carrying around 50 people sank in the Bagmati river, some 70 kilometres (43 miles) north of the state capital Patna, a police spokesman here said.

Witnesses at the site said that 15 people had swum to safety but the others were swept away by the strong currents of the rain-swollen Bagmati river.

The accident occurred in Muzzafarpur, one of 16 districts of Bihar ravaged by floods, state government officials said.●