GAUHATI, India - Teeming monsoon rains have inundated wide swaths of northern India and neighboring Bangladesh, killing at least 166 people and washing away villages and farmland that 19 million people depend on, officials said Thursday.
With rain-swollen rivers bursting their banks along the fertile plains south of the Himalayas, India sent soldiers to help evacuate people from some of the worst-hit areas.
"I have not seen such flooding in the last 24 years. It's a sheet of water everywhere," said Santosh Mishra, a resident of the Gonda district in Uttar Pradesh, one of the areas soldiers were sent. Authorities urged residents of 65 nearby villages to evacuate.
"There are no signs of houses, temples or trees," Mishra told the local Sahara Samay television channel.
Some 14 million people in India and 5 million in Bangladesh were displaced or marooned by the flooding, according to government figures, with at least 120 people killed in recent days in India and 46 more in Bangladesh.
Among the hardest hit regions was the northeastern Indian state of Assam, the two northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and neighboring Bangladesh, where relentless rains have caused dozens of swollen rivers to burst their banks and inundate the surrounding regions.
"The situation is grim," said Bhumidhar Barman, a minister in the Assam state government.
The monsoon season in South Asia runs from June to September and is vital to the region's agriculture, a giant source of income and food. But the monsoons are always dangerous, with more than 1,000 people dying last year, most by drowning, landslides, house collapses or electrocution.
In New Delhi, India's Meteorological Department said unusual monsoon patterns this year led to heavier than usual rains in these regions, while central India had only light rains. "We've been getting constant rainfall in these areas for nearly 20 days," said B. P. Yadav, a spokesman for the department.
In Assam, some 100,000 displaced people were staying in government relief camps while hundreds of thousands more sought shelter on higher ground, setting up makeshift dwellings. Millions more were cut off from the rest of the country.
Flood waters washed away 1,640 yards of highway and a wooden bridge on the only alternate road in the worst hit Dhemaji region in Assam, said Dibakar Misra, a government official.
He said railway services were suspended and boats were used to rescue people as waters reached 30 feet deep in some places.
Atul Deka, a farmer, watched helplessly as swirling waters washed away the bamboo footbridge connecting his village to the road.
"We couldn't do anything as it happened in a flash. Now, we have to depend on the few row boats we have until the floods recede and we build the bridge all over again," said Deka, from Satdola, on the outskirts of Gauhati, the capital of Assam.
Meanwhile, medical teams were trying to visit different regions by boat to make sure that there were no outbreaks of water-born diseases like cholera.
In Bihar, 120 relief centers had been set up but some people still had to camp out along highways, said Manoj Srivastava, a state disaster management official.
In Uttar Pradesh, the army was called in to help evacuate people from 500 flooded villages, said Diwakar Tripathi, a senior government official, adding that crops worth hundreds of thousands of dollars had been ruined. On Wednesday, 28 people died when the overcrowded boat evacuating them from their village sank in a swollen river.
In Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation of 145 million people, the River Jamuna breached its banks, inundating much of Sirajganj, a small town 65 miles northwest of the capital, Dhaka.
Schools and government offices have been closed as streets in Sirajganj were under waist-high water.
