Monsoon brings India to its knees; floods claim 52 lives

A longish spell of rain leaves civic life in a gigantic mess, from Delhi-NCR to Mumbai to Bangalore to Chennai. 
Outlining the reasons for such a pathetic state of the nation, the FirstPost.com says, roads and areas get inundated, residents in localities keep scrambling for higher safe ground, traffic comes to a grinding halt; in short normal life gets choked in every possible way. 
This is not to mention of remote places such as Assam or Odisha that face the fury of rain and floods every year because the cities mentioned above are the loci of India’s political, financial and technological power, the show pieces of India’s urbanization story, the report says. 
If things can go so bad at these places then the condition of the rest of India is only left to one’s imagination. It takes one good monsoon shower to show us what we are, the shallowness we all are steeped in and the collective hypocrisy that drives our lives as citizens.
The authorities on Saturday meanwhile tried to rescue thousands of people stranded in flooded villages after a week of heavy rain killed at least 52 people and uprooted tens of thousands of others from their homes in the states of Assam in the remote northeast and Bihar in the east. Twenty-six deaths have been reported in Assam, where incessant downpours have damaged roads and snapped telephone cables in several districts, a government statement said.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh flew over the worst-hit areas on Saturday and said the floods were “very serious.”
Twenty-six deaths also have been reported in Bihar due to drowning and home collapses in 10 districts bordering Nepal. The Bihar state government was running more than 350 relief camps providing food and other necessities to the flood victims. The federal government-run National Disaster Response Force was helping with relief efforts.
Vast tracts of Assam’s Kaziranga National Park, home to the rare one-horned rhino, and another wildlife reserve were under water, the state government said in a statement. Forest officials found the remains of six rhinos drowned by floodwaters in Kaziranga, the statement said. Another rhino was killed in another national reserve in the state.
The Brahmaputra River and its tributaries were overflowing their banks in 18 of Assam’s districts, washing away roads and highways and toppling power pylons. Floodwaters entered homes in at least 14 districts, leading to house collapses.
Floods are an annual occurrence in Assam and many parts of India during the June-September monsoon season.

Source; Arab News