DHAKA/GUWAHATI, June 22(ABC): Floodwaters inundated more of Bangladesh and northeast India on Tuesday, officials said, as authorities struggled to reach more than 9.5 million people stranded with little food and drinking water after days of intense rain.
Particularly heavy monsoon rain has brought the worst floods in more than a century in some parts of low-lying Bangladesh and have killed at least 69 people over the past two weeks there and in northeast India’s Assam state.
“People are without food. They are not even getting drinking water since floodwater submerged all tube wells,” Abu Bakar, 26, a resident of hard-hit Sunamganj district in northeastern Bangladesh, told Reuters by telephone.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina flew over some of the flood-hit areas on Tuesday, looking down on huge tracts covered by brown water, broken up by occasional outcrop of land, television footage showed.