GUWAHATI-DHAKA, July 12: More than half a million people in India and Bangladesh have been driven out of their homes by heavy monsoon flooding that has killed more than 200 people in the past two weeks, officials said on Saturday.

Indian soldiers in motorboats evacuated hundreds of marooned people in northeastern Assam state where about 400,000 have been left homeless after overflowing rivers inundated thousands of villages.

“The situation has turned worse. We don’t know what to do,” Nurjamal Sarkar, Assam’s flood control minister, told Reuters.

In neighbouring Bangladesh, a second spell of floods in less than a month left around 250,000 people homeless and 1.5 million more cut off from help.

Bangladesh deployed sonar equipment to search for a river ferry that was sucked into a whirlpool and sank three days ago, killing more than 400 people.

Eighteen people died in overnight flooding in Assam while seven were killed in Bangladesh as the swollen Brahmaputra river swept away thousands of bamboo and straw huts and vast tracts of crop lands in both countries.

In the eastern state of Bihar, flood waters have killed seven people over the past 36 hours and submerged vast tracts of low-lying land, Jagdanand Singh, the state’s minister for water resources, told Reuters.

He said the government had distributed food, clothes and other relief material to people displaced from their homes.

The torrential downpour also washed away roads, bridges, railway tracks and phone and power lines in eastern India and hit the movement of trains and road links in Bangladesh, a country criss-crossed by hundreds of rivers and tributaries.

Indian authorities have set up emergency camps to shelter the displaced in Assam.

Residents in Assam’s main city, Guwahati, living close to the Brahmaputra have been forced to move out after water entered their houses. The swelling Brahmaputra has threatened to engulf more areas in the city of one million people.

The monsoon is India’s economic lifeline, with more than 70 percent of its more than one billion people relying on agriculture for a living.

Parts of the country, such as Assam, where more than 100 rivers flow from surrounding mountains, are ill-equipped to deal with the annual deluge.—Reuters