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Flooding Kills Hundreds in Northern India Flooding Kills Hundreds in Northern India
(about 1 hour later)
RUDRAPRAYAG, India — Flash floods and landslides unleashed by early monsoon rains have killed at least 560 people in northern India and left tens of thousands missing, officials said on Saturday, with the death toll expected to rise significantly. NEW DELHI — Flash floods and landslides in northern India have killed at least 1,000 people in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in the past week, an official said Saturday, and with thousands missing or stranded the toll is expected to rise.
Houses and small apartment blocks on the banks of the Ganges, India’s longest river, have toppled into the rushing, swollen waters and been swept away with cars and trucks. The official, Vijay Bahuguna, the chief minister of Uttarakhand, confirmed the latest toll in a meeting with reporters on Saturday. Describing the floods as a “national crisis,” Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde told the Indian press on Saturday that 40,000 people were still stranded.
“It has been a horrifying experience,” said Tulika Srivastava, from the northern Indian city of Lucknow, who has been stranded since last week with her 80-year-old mother in the pilgrimage town of Rudraprayag in Uttarakhand State. Most of the stranded were people on a four-stop pilgrimage known as Char Dham Yatra, which takes Hindu pilgrims to four of the holiest shrines in Uttarakhand between May and November.
Thousands of military troops were involved in rescue operations, with air force helicopters rescuing survivors, many of them Hindu pilgrims and tourists, from the foothills of the Himalayas. To aid the rescue efforts in the narrow mountainous valleys at altitudes as high as 11,000 feet above sea level, members of the Indian military have been pressed into service. By Saturday, the water levels of the flooded rivers and streams that run through the state had receded, but the floods have destroyed roads, bridges, electrical poles and communication networks.
About 33,000 people had been rescued so far this week, the Home Ministry said. Railways were running special trains from the devastated areas to take people home. More than 40 helicopters were being used to rescue pilgrims from remote mountainous areas, according to Indian officials, but the difficult terrain has hampered the rescue operations. A rescue helicopter crashed Friday while trying to evacuate trapped pilgrims in a village near Kedarnath. The pilot was injured, police officials told the Press Trust of India, the official news agency of India, and is being treated in a local hospital.
“Whatever is humanly possible is being done,” the minister of information and broadcasting, Manish Tewari, said. Families throughout India are frantically trying to locate their missing relatives.
The rains had eased on Saturday, but more rain was expected early next week, complicating the task of rescuers. “Four of my friends, who are priests, are missing,” said Naresh Kukreti, a 34-year-old priest at the Kedarnath temple, one of the holiest shrines of Hinduism, in Uttarakhand. “We don’t know whether they are alive or dead.”
As many as 150,000 people were flown from the reach of the floods, said Dinesh Malasi, a rescue official at Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand, with 60 helicopters pressed into the task. Mr. Kukreti said Saturday that after the ritual evening prayer last Sunday he was filled with unease. “It had been raining for two days and fewer pilgrims were visiting the temple,” he said. “I had a strange feeling something terrible was about to happen.”
Aid workers were struggling to negotiate roads blocked by landslides to reach the Kedarnath Valley, one of the worst-affected areas, where thousands of pilgrims had been stranded. Some of those rescued by helicopter told charity officials in Dehradun that they had seen bodies scattered everywhere. Mr. Kukreti, who has been working as a priest at the eighth-century Kedarnath temple built high up in the Himalayas at 11,759 feet above sea level, retired to his modest quarters for after the prayers. “Suddenly a deafening noise shook everything,” he said. “It felt like an earthquake.” Mr. Kukreti and about 800 pilgrims sought refuge in the rock temple dedicated to the lord Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.
“The deaths will certainly rise,” said Madan Mohan Doval, an official of Sphere India, a group of nongovernment agencies working in the area that includes the international charity Plan and the Indian Red Cross Society. “Within minutes, a river of black water and big stones followed us into the temple,” Mr. Kukreti said, speaking by phone after returning to his home village, Tailagram, in the Rudraprayag district of Uttrakhand. The ancient rock temple survived the assault, but when the water receded after a cold night of prayer, Mr. Kukreti found himself standing among piles of dead pilgrims. “Everywhere I looked I saw dead men, women, and children,” he said.
“People are in immediate need of basic aid such as dry food, clean drinking water, clothes, medicines, tarpaulin sheets for shelter and blankets,” Mr. Doval added. Most of the buildings around the Kedarnath temple were destroyed and the town of Kedarnath that has grown around the temple was submerged. After braving cold, hunger, and grief for three days inside the Kedarnath temple, Mr. Kukreti and about 400 pilgrims trekked a few miles to reach an emergency landing pad, where rescue helicopters airlifted them to a relief camp.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh offered 200,000 rupees, or $3,400, to the family of each of those who lost their lives and 50,000 rupees to the injured from a national relief fund. He also pledged money to people who have lost their homes. Google has developed a Person Finder application for the Uttarakhand area, and the Uttarakhand government has created a message board on its official Web site, where relatives of missing pilgrims are posting their phone numbers and names, last locations, and pictures of their missing relatives. In a message on the Uttarakhand government bulletin board, Rajneesh, an anxious relative, who uses only one name, said he was looking for his missing brother, sister-in-law and their two children named “Honey” and “Money.” He wrote, in part, “please sir help me for find out help me.”
Mr. Singh promised $167 million in disaster relief to Uttarakhand, home of the gods in Hindu mythology and the hardest-hit state. The fragile ecosystems of the Himalayan pilgrimage centers have been straining to cope with the disaster. In the past two decades, religiosity has increased in India, along with economic growth. The numbers of pilgrims visiting religious sites has greatly increased. According to official statistics, the number of tourists visiting the flood-affected state of Uttarakhand increased to 30 million in 2010 from 10 million in 2001.
“It is an ecologically fragile region and the Himalayas are young mountains, but there is haphazard construction to serve increasing numbers of tourists and pilgrims,” said Ashish Kothari, an Indian environmentalist and co-author of “Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India.” “All sorts of hydroelectric projects are coming up in these areas and anything goes in the name of environment assessment.”
The rescuers are racing against time as the Indian Meteorological Department has predicted an increase in rainfall in northern India from Monday.
Around 73,000 pilgrims have been evacuated so far, according to Indian officials. In an interview with a television network, Mr. Bahuguna, the chief minister of Uttarakhand, said that it might take about two weeks to evacuate all stranded pilgrims and locate the missing.
Mr. Kukreti, the priest, said that many people “were so scared” that they “ran into forests to save themselves.”
“I worry how any helicopters can reach those who are in narrow valleys or jungles,” he said. “They might die of hunger before the government reaches them.”

Hari Kumar and Malavika Vyawahare contributed reporting.