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Nearly 200 perish in India, Nepal rains
Nearly 200 people have died in floods and landslides in India and Nepal, with whole families buried in their homes and two young girls swept away as forecasters warned of yet more heavy rain.
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Rescue workers carry a body of a victim at a site of a landslide claimed to be caused by heavy rains in Kokkayar in India's Kerala state on October 17, 2021. (AFP/-)
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early 200 people have died in floods and landslides in India and Nepal, officials said Thursday, with whole families buried in their homes and two young girls swept away as forecasters warned of yet more heavy rain.
Experts say that they were victims of the ever-more unpredictable and extreme weather that has hit South Asia in recent years caused by climate change and exacerbated by deforestation, damming and excessive development.
The unusually late deluge of rain in the region saw Nepal record the sharpest rise in casualties overnight, with 88 people now dead, among them a family of six whose house was obliterated by an avalanche of soil and debris.
"It doesn't rain this time of the year," said Nawaraj Kattel, 37, a local journalist who fled his flooded home in Morang in eastern Nepal.
"There are about 100 families in our area, everyone fled. We are staying at my sister's house but many don't have shelters. Many have also lost their harvest," he told AFP.
In the Himalayan northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, some parts of which recorded the most rain in more than a century, 55 people were confirmed Thursday to have died.
They included five people from a single family whose house was buried by a massive landslide.
