07 August 2004	Saturday	20 Jamadi-us-Saani 1425

AHMEDABAD, Aug 6: Thousands of villagers living near one of India's largest dams prepared to evacuate on Friday after it started overflowing following monsoon rains.

South Asia's worst flooding in 15 years has spread to western and northern India, and storms drenched the catchment of the giant Narmada dam, triggering a wall of water that threatens to envelop villages downstream.

Authorities began diverting water into canals from the 33.5 metre-high dam in Gujarat state. Environmentalists have opposed the dam, saying it is unsafe and will displace a million people once the project is finished.

"If the water level in the Narmada river rises by another few feet, dozens of villages will be under water. So, it's a very serious situation," said district chief Rajiv Topno.

More than 1,700 people have been killed in South Asia, most of them in Bangladesh and eastern India, in several weeks of monsoon flooding in one of the world's most densely populated regions.

Floodwater has started receding in Bangladesh and eastern India, but hundreds of thousands of people left homeless are still living in camps, facing a lack of clean water to drink, little to eat and the threat of disease.

Weeks of incessant rains have also destroyed crops in large parts of South Asia, where many live on farms. The floods have disrupted rail and road links as well as communications and power networks.

EVACUATION PLAN: Officials said water from the overflowing dam in Gujarat could submerge the homes of about 20,000 people living in 10 villages around the dam site and an evacuation plan was ready to move them at short notice to relief camps.

The Narmada Valley project is India's biggest dam schemes. About 3,200 small, medium-sized and large dams are to be built on the 1,300km-long river and its tributaries to generate electricity and provide water to millions of people.

Gujarat's government recently raised the height of the dam, despite opposition by environment groups led by Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy, to provide drinking and irrigation water to large, arid parts of the state.

At least 1,000 people were evacuated miles away in central Gujarat after a river began overflowing on Friday, taking the total number of people confined to relief camps in the state to over 100,000.

A storm accompanied by torrential rains swept across northern Gujarat on Thursday, injuring 40 people and destroying 300 houses. Monsoon rains in East Punjab and Haryana have submerged nearly 500 villages, forcing thousands of people stranded in flood waters to spend days on rooftops.

Army and airforce officials plucked out people stranded in flood waters and distributed food and medicine in the region, where at least 14 people were killed and a dozen people missing.

BD SITUATION GRIM: In Bangladesh, where more than 670 people have been killed in weeks of flooding, thousands of people living in make-shift tents were pleading for food and medicine.

"Life is not easy here, but going back would be more traumatic," said Ranjana, a 45-year-old woman and mother of three children, "There is probably nothing left, no house, no crop, no cattle and no hope. The floods have stripped us of everything, and every means of living." -Reuters