Floods, landslides kill 42 people in India

Surging river waters and landslides killed at least 42 people in eastern India over the past two days and left more than 215,000 homeless as monsoon rains lashed the flood-prone region, officials said on Wednesday.

Surging river waters and landslides killed at least 42 people in eastern India over the past two days and left more than 215,000 homeless as monsoon rains lashed the flood-prone region, officials said on Wednesday.

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In Assam, 25 people, including four children, drowned as heavy monsoon rains caused rivers to swell and inundated thousands of villages.

Seventeen people died in neighbouring West Bengal following heavy downpours in the mountainous, tea-rich district of Darjeeling.

"Seven people are still missing and we presume they are dead," Hridyesh Mohan, a senior government official, told Reuters by phone.

Raging flood waters left around 200,000 people homeless in Assam, of whom about 100,000 had taken shelter in government camps. About 15,000 people were displaced from their homes in two northern districts in West Bengal because of swollen rivers.

Authorities used boats to rescue thousands of people marooned in their houses and villages. In many areas, people were stranded on rooftops of mud houses.

Officials said they expected more flooding in tea-and-oil-rich Assam as decades-old mud embankments were not likely to withstand overflowing rivers.

"We are helpless because we have no money to repair them," Nurjamal Sarkar, Assam's water resources minister, told Reuters.

The June-September monsoon is crucial to the Indian economy as around 70 percent of the country's one-billion plus population depends on agriculture.

But the often torrential downpours also cause flooding every year in Assam where 100 rivers flow in from surrounding states and neighbouring Bhutan.

In 2002, floods in Assam killed 100 people and left 2.5 million out of the total population of 26 million people homeless.