NEW DELHI: Aid agencies were struggling on Saturday to get relief to millions of villagers marooned in northeast India, Nepal and Bangladesh who have been hit by devastating floods, as the Red Cross warned that as few as two per cent of those affected were getting the help they needed.

Up to 20 million people across the whole of South Asia are believed to have been affected by the most severe floods in living memory, according to Unicef. Eastern India was facing a health crisis as hospitals in the region were overwhelmed by people suffering from waterborne diseases.

Health workers and aid groups in Assam in northeast India were working around the clock to treat and feed many of the three million people displaced or surrounded by floodwaters with the limited medicines and supplies available.

Elsewhere, villagers were getting desperate and hungry. “Our family survived for a week on buffalo milk, but now the animal has stopped producing milk as it has gone without food for days,” said Meghu Yadav, a villager in the Samastipur district of impoverished Bihar state in the north of the country.

Devendra Tak of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said: “There are millions of people who are really in anguish, marooned in water, and relief has really not reached enough people.”

The scale of the devastation remains unclear. Unicef said the situation was “still so overwhelming” that it was proving difficult to estimate accurately the numbers of people displaced and killed, but news agencies reported that at least 200 had so far died.

Army helicopters dropped emergency food supplies for villagers stranded in Bihar, and aid organisations were trying to reach remote regions of the state in boats loaded with vital provisions.

In Bihar, the worst affected area in India, where as many as 70,000 homes are thought to have been destroyed, villagers built temporary encampments on railway tracks or raised highways. The army began to evacuate people and bring help to the estimated 10 million in the state affected by the floods. In Uttar Pradesh villagers were seen by TV news crews clinging to treetops and screaming for help. “The gush of water was so sudden we did not get the time to react,” Vinod Kumar, a villager, said.

“Even people accustomed to flooding perceive the severity of this one,” said Marzio Babille, Unicef India’s head of health.

Angry protests broke out across the state as resentment at the local government mounted over a perceived failure to protect residents from the effects of the annual monsoon. One person was killed and more than 20 injured during clashes with the police.Beyond the immediate misery, aid agencies warned that the long-term implications would be severe. “The issue is not the immediate impact of the floods, but what happens two or three weeks down the line,” said a Unicef spokeswoman in Delhi. —Dawn/ The Observer News Service