Soldiers help people cross a collapsed section of a road in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand.
DEHRADUN: The military battled yesterday to reach villages and towns cut off by flash floods and landslides in the country’s north as officials warned at least 1,000 people may have been killed.
Helicopters and close to 10,000 soldiers have been deployed to rescue tourists and pilgrims stranded after floods caused by torrential monsoon rains hit the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand at the weekend.
More than 33,100 people have so far been rescued, as the military takes advantage of clearer weather, but another 50,400 are still stranded, the Home Ministry said in a statement released late yesterday.
“Our priority is to take out the children and women first by helicopter,” said Ajay Chadha, chief of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police.
“We hope to rescue all the living and then start the scavenging task,” Chadha said in New Delhi, referring to the task of finding the dead.
Houses, buildings and vehicles have collapsed or been swept away by overflowing rivers and landslides, while bridges and narrow roads leading to pilgrimage towns have been destroyed, officials said.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh launched an online appeal for funds, asking “all citizens of India to stand with our distressed fellow countrymen” and “donate generously”.
Torrential rains four and a half times as heavy as usual have hit Uttarakhand, where Hindu shrines and temples built high in the mountains attract many pilgrims.
At least 138 people have been confirmed dead across Uttarakhand and two neighbouring states also hit by floods and landslides, officials said, but shrine authorities warned the toll was more than 1,000.
“We estimate more than 1,000 people have died as unattended bodies are scattered all around,” said Ganesh Godiyal, chairman of a trust in charge of several shrines in the pilgrimage towns of Kedarnath and Badrinath.
With the magnitude of the misery caused by weekend torrential rains and flash floods becoming clear, officials admitted it might take three years for pilgrimages to the revered Kedarnath shrine to resume.
BD Singh, chief executive officer of the Badrinath-Kedarnath Temple Committee, said: “What we are seeing is very painful and unbelievable. We don’t expect the Char Dham Yatra to resume in the next three years.”
Another official said the Kedarnath shrine, built by Adi Shankara over 1,000 years ago, survived the floods but virtually everything around it had been destroyed.
The military operation was focused on the Kedarnath temple area, as families of the missing faced an anxious wait in Uttarakhand’s capital Dehradun.
Some of those rescued told of scrambling to higher ground to escape raging waters, only to watch helplessly as buildings, cars and even bodies were swept away before them.
“There is nothing left in Kedarnath now except the temple,” pilgrim Sitaram Sukhatiahe said after arriving by helicopter in Dehradun.
Figures for the death toll have varied considerably, underscoring the difficulty of reaching isolated areas. An Uttarakhand state lawmaker, Shaila Rani Rawat, put the death toll at 2,000, but disaster management officials could not confirm this.
Nearly 10,000 soldiers along with 13 teams from the National Disaster Response Force have been deployed for the rescue and relief effort, the government said.
Paramilitary soldiers have been building rope and log bridges across raging rivers to try to reach those stranded.
Relief camps have been set up to house evacuated residents and tourists. Some 22 helicopters are ferrying many of those rescued to the camps, while 14 tonnes of food and relief aid has been dropped in remote areas, the air force and the government said.
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