August 4, 2002	Sunday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 24,1423

NEW DELHI, Aug 3: The death toll caused by floods in India rose to 142 on Saturday, as more areas were inundated in the Bihar area of eastern India.

According to officials, the Bagmati and Kareh rivers flooded fresh areas, leaving more than one million people stranded and destroying crops on 48,000 hectares of land, the United News of India (UNI) reported.

The Central Water Commission said all major rivers in the state had risen above the danger mark. The weather forecast predicted moderate to heavy rains in the region for the next 48 hours.

Reports from the north eastern Indian state of Assam said that 80 per cent of the Morigaon district was under water and 600,000 people were affected.

Since the advent of the monsoons in June, at least 200 people have died and six million people have been stranded in eastern and north-eastern India.

GUWAHATI: Floods in the northeastern Indian state of Assam have caused more than 600 million dollars worth of damage and led to a range of epidemics that have claimed 110 lives, officials said Saturday.

Assam’s Chief Minister, Tarun Gogoi, said initial estimates put the loss from the floods at 30 billion rupees (612 million dollars) but the final figure would be much higher.

Assam has been reeling under floods for the past month, with at least 41 people drowning or being washed away by the swollen waters of the Brahmaputra river.

The floods have also left about five million people from 5,500 villages homeless.

Although the waters have begun to recede the state is now battling diarrhoea, encephalitis and other epidemics, a local official said.

At least 14 people, most of them tea garden workers, died of gastroenteritis in eastern Assam’s Golaghat district this week, while hundreds of others fell ill with the disease.

“The tea garden management didn’t inform us about the outbreak of gastroenteritis and so the disease is assuming serious proportions,” J.B. Ekka, Golaghat District Magistrate told AFP by telephone.

Ten other people died this week of Japanese-B encephalitis, bringing to 90 the death toll from the disease since the beginning of July, according to Nandita Choudhary, the principal of Assam Medical College.

Encephalitis causes inflammation of the brain tissue, producing symptoms of high fever, headache, loss of voice and involuntary movement of the body.

The disease is transmitted by mosquitoes from late spring to early autumn.

Other water-borne diseases have claimed six lives in the past fortnight in various parts of eastern Assam, Choudhary said.

BOAT CAPSIZES: At least 10 people were killed when a boat capsized in a swollen river in the flood-hit state of Bihar, officials said on Saturday.

The wooden boat carrying a family to safety from rising flood waters sank in Khanpur, some 160 kilometres north of the state capital Patna in Bihar’s worst flood-hit district of Samastipur, said an administrative official.—dpa/AFP