GUWAHATI, July 8: The mighty Brahmaputra river burst its banks at several points early on Tuesday, bringing to 1.4 million the number of people made homeless by floods in India and Bangladesh, as disease, rising waters and landslides claimed 16 more lives.

Fourteen people were killed Tuesday, including 11 in a landslide, when heavy rains lashed Darjeeling, police said.

The landslides follow weeks of rain and floods that have killed at least 85 people and left 1.4 million homeless in eastern India and Bangladesh.

“Eleven people were killed and five houses destroyed in the landslides, which were caused by heavy rainfall in the hills over the past few days,” said Chayan Mukherjee, inspector general of police for West Bengal state.

“The bodies of the victims were found under the rubble,” he told AFP.

Three people, including a teenage girl, were swept away in flood waters in the state, police said.

To the east, the Brahmaputra, the 2,900-kilometer river that winds down from the mountains of Tibet to the delta of Bangladesh, broke its embankments in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, submerging roads and smashing down mud embankments.

Local officials estimated 200,000 more people were left homeless on Tuesday across five districts of Assam as the rising Brahmaputra washed away their huts.

One million people had already been stranded by the floods at the weekend in Assam, according to the provincial government.

Another 200,000 people from 121 villages in the eastern Indian state of Bihar have also been affected, according to a statement by the province’s relief department.

Tens of thousands of people are also estimated to have been left homeless by the floods in other parts of northeastern India and in Bangladesh.

In Bangladesh, waters were rolling down from the flooded north to the low-lying heart of the country, according to the Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre in Dhaka.

Officials at the flood centre said the flooding should abate in the northern areas within a few days as rains subsided. But as the water moved south, the drenched north is fearing water-borne disease.

The mass-circulation Ittefaq said a six year-old boy and an elderly villager died of diarrhoeal disease in the northwestern Gaibandha district after waters from flash floods began to recede.

While no official death toll has been provided for Bangladesh as a whole, the deaths bring the number of reported dead in weather-related incidents this year to 67, with most killed in landslides in the southeastern hill tracts late last month.—AFP