About 100,000 people have been evacuated from flooded villages in Pakistan’s Punjab province after India dumped several thousand cubic meters of water into a river that flows through both countries on Sunday, officials said on Wednesday. emergency services.
Several hundred villages in the Punjab (Central East) were inundated by the flooding of this river, the Sutlej, and thousands of hectares of agricultural land, particularly plantations, were destroyed.
“We rescued 100,000 people and moved them to safer places,” Farooq Ahmad, spokesman for Punjab’s emergency services, told AFP on Wednesday.
India poured nearly 85,000 m3 of excess water per second into its reservoirs on Sunday, prompting flooding downstream on the Pakistani side, according to Punjab leader Mohsin Naqvi, after heavy monsoon rains caused flooding.
The dikes that were supposed to protect the dwellings collapsed and hundreds of villages are no longer accessible by road.
Relief operations continue in the flooded areas, where authorities have had to use boats to house men, women, children and livestock.
“There is too much water here. “The children are hungry and have nothing to eat,” Sidhra Bibi, a villager who has taken refuge in a camp in Kasur, one of seven districts at least affected or on the verge of death, told AFP.
“All crops have been destroyed. We don’t even have a house,” she lamented.
“The main problem that (the villagers) face is that of their livestock,” which is often their only source of income, explained Dr. Muhammad Amin, a volunteer at an aid camp, told AFP.
The provincial disaster management agency has warned that the flooding could worsen in the coming days as more monsoon rains are expected in the region.
At least 175 people have died in floods, building collapses, landslides and other monsoon-related incidents since late June in Pakistan.
According to the Pakistani authorities, 16 of them died between July 9 and August 22 in floods directly caused by the regular discharge of water through India.
Pakistan is still trying to recover from the devastating floods that ravaged nearly a third of its territory in 2022, affecting more than 33 million people and killing more than 1,700.