Bangladeshis taking refuge in emergency shelters after heavy flooding | Bangladesh

Nearly 300,000 Bangladeshis are taking refuge in emergency shelters from floods that inundated vast areas of the country, disaster officials said.

The floods were triggered by heavy monsoon rains and have killed at least 42 people in Bangladesh and India since the start of the week, many in landslides.

Lufton Nahar, 60, speaking from a relief shelter in Feni, one of the worst-hit districts near the border with India’s Tripura state, said: “My house is completely inundated. Water is flowing above our roof. My brother brought us here by boat. If he hadn’t, we would have died.”

The country of 170 million people is crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers and has experienced frequent floods in recent decades.

Monsoon rains cause widespread destruction every year but the climate crisis is shifting weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.

Highways and railway lines were damaged between the capital, Dhaka, and the main port city of Chattogram, making access to badly flooded districts difficult and disrupting businesses.

The flooding happened weeks after a student-led revolution toppled its government.

Among the worst-affected flood-hit areas is Cox’s Bazar, a district home to about 1 million Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Myanmar.

Sarat Kumar Das, a disaster agency official in the Indian state of Tripura, told Agence-France Presse that 24 people had been killed on the Indian side of the border since Monday.

Another 18 had been killed in Bangladesh, according to the disaster management ministry secretary, Md Kamrul Hasan, who said “285,000 people are living in emergency shelters” and adding that 4.5 million people in total had been affected.

When the floods hit, Bangladesh was recovering from weeks of civil unrest that culminated in the autocratic ex-leader Sheikh Hasina fleeing the country.

With an interim government led by the Nobel peace prize laureate Muhammad Yunus still finding its feet, ordinary Bangladeshis have been crowdfunding relief efforts, organised by the same students who led the protests that led to the ousting of Hasina, who remains in India after fleeing Dhaka.

Crowds visited Dhaka University on Friday to offer cash donations as students loaded rice sacks and crates of bottled water on to vehicles for areas affected by the deluge.

Much of Bangladesh is made up of deltas where the great Himalayan rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, wind towards the sea after coursing through India. Several tributaries of the two transnational rivers were still overflowing, however, forecasts showed rain was likely to ease in the coming days.