July 28, 2002	Sunday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 17,1423

GUWAHATI, July 27: Army soldiers were called out on Saturday as flash-floods burst a critical embankment on the outskirts of India’s largest northeastern city, trapping some 8,000 inhabitants in swirling waters.

Officials said the embankment collapsed and rain water gushed through eight settlements on the fringes of Guwahati, capital of Assam state, on Saturday.

“Soldiers, police, and civil workers were rescuing hundreds of people marooned following the breach,” the city’s police chief said.

“Rescue workers are having a tough time as the water current is very strong.

The police official estimated that some 8,000 people in the marooned villages were trapped.

Oil-rich Assam is facing one of the worst floods in four years in the neglected region. Some two million people here have been affected.

Another four million people have been hit by the floods in four neighbouring eastern Indian states.

Millions of others in India’s parched north are facing a crippling drought due to an unprecedented absence of monsoon rains.

In Assam, officials said the mighty Brahmaputra river was flowing one metre above an official danger level near Guwahati city.

Rain-swollen Brahmaputra has cut a swathe in Assam, flooding up to 4,500 villages and leaving some 2.8 million people homeless since July 1 in this state alone.

“The situation is very critical and some new districts have come now under floods,” Assam’s Flood Control Minister, Nurzamal Sarkar, said.

“More than 80 percent of Assam is now under floods.”

Floods in three neighbouring eastern states have claimed the lives of at least 60 people.

Floods in Assam have killed 19 people this month. Thousands of rare animals have also fled the now-submerged Kaziranga National Park here.

The 430-square-kilometre park, east of Guwahati, boasts 1,600 of a total world population of 2,300 one-horned rhinos. The complex also has a large population of deer, bison and endangered Asian elephants.—AFP