PATNA, Aug 6: Hungry victims of South Asia's devastating floods have been reduced to fighting over food supplies and looting, officials said on Monday, with one teenager drowning as he scrambled for air-dropped provisions.

Sarfaraz, 17, drowned in Darbhanga district of eastern India's Bihar state as he went after food being dropped by helicopter, and dozens of others have been injured in similar scrambles or in fights over dwindling food supplies.

More than 455 people have died in India, Bangladesh and Nepal in the latest phase of the annual monsoon floods, which began two to three weeks ago.

The floods, the worst in living memory in some areas, have affected 35 million people in the region and are being seen by some as a symptom of climate change. Ten million people have been made homeless or left stranded, and are becoming increasingly desperate as they face food shortages and water-borne diseases even as the waters begin to recede in parts of Nepal and northeast India.

Women and children in a Bihar village clashed over small packets of biscuits being handed out by a local aid organisation, while villagers in another part of the state looted a tractor full of grain, officials said.

“We are surviving on snails as we have nothing to eat,” Bhagwan Manjhi of Bihar's East Champaran district told a local news channel.

In Bihar's Begusarai district, hundreds of people living in makeshift tarpaulin and bamboo shelters on mud embankments rushed down to a nearby field as a helicopter hovered close to the ground.—Reuters