GUWAHATI/KATMANDU: Severe floods in India have affected more than 1.6 million people, buried hundreds of villages and almost submerged a national park, forcing wildlife to seek refuge on roads, authorities said on Wednesday.
With the weather office forecasting heavy rain for at least another 48 hours, the outlook is grim for the northeastern tea-growing state of Assam, which suffered its worst floods four years ago that killed 124 people and displaced six million.
In neighboring Nepal, flash floods and landslides swept through villages, killing at least 58 people over two days, Home Ministry official Yadav Koirala told Reuters on Wednesday. Another 20 people are missing and the Nepal Army is racing to evacuate hundreds more from flooded villages as the waters rise.
Floods and landslides are common in India and Nepal during the June-September monsoon season and the death toll runs into the hundreds every year.
“Our teams are working continuously in search and rescue operations, as well as to provide relief,” deputy spokesman Jhanka Nath Dhakal told AFP.
“The situation has turned from bad to worse since Tuesday and over a million people have been shifted to relief camps,” Assam’s Water Resources Minister Keshab Mahanta said.
The Brahmaputra river and its tributaries have burst their banks, affecting more than half of the region’s 32 districts.
Police and rescue workers said at least 12 people had drowned across the state of Assam in recent days.
Animals from the state’s national parks came out onto roads built up on banks and other high ground as the flood inundated forests.
The state has five national parks, including the Kaziranga National Park, which is home to two-thirds of the world’s one-horned rhinoceroses.
“More than 80 percent of the park is under water,” said Suvasis Das, a forestry official in the park.
Forest officials said they have rescued a 3-month-old rhino that took shelter in a backyard in a village. At least 20 hog deer were either washed away or drowned.
Assam’s Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal urged authorities to provide safe drinking water to prevent the outbreak of disease.
Images released by the army, which is involved in the operation, showed villagers waiting on rooftops to be evacuated in motorboats.
Scores of people die every year from flooding and landslides during the monsoon rains in Nepal and neighboring India.
Earlier this month, two children were killed when a school in the capital partially collapsed in heavy rains.
The situation is particularly desperate this year because millions of Nepalis are still living in tents or makeshift huts after a devastating earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people in 2015.
Floods, landslides kill 58 in Nepal; ravage NE India
Floods, landslides kill 58 in Nepal; ravage NE India
Unprecedented gagging order over Afghan data breach should have been avoided, former secretary says
- Ben Wallace tells MPs that he had ordered time-limited injunction to protect lives of Afghan veterans
- Sensitive details of thousands was leaked via email mistake because ‘someone didn’t do their job’
LONDON: The former UK defense secretary has said he would not have proposed a secret gagging order to conceal the catastrophic data breach that threatened the lives of thousands of Afghans.
Ben Wallace told MPs on Tuesday that he had ordered a time-limited injunction to protect the news of the data leak, The Independent reported.
At the time, in mid-2023, the Ministry of Defence had scrambled the learn the source of the leak, which took place when an official accidentally emailed a sensitive spreadsheet containing Afghans’ contact details outside of the ministry.
It led to the publication of the identities of thousands of Afghans who had served alongside British forces during the war against the Taliban, placing them at risk of reprisal.
They were secretly relocated to the UK, and the leak was only revealed to the British public when a High Court judge lifted a superinjunction last year.
It followed a longtime lobbying effort by The Independent and other news organizations to have the details of the leak released.
Wallace told MPs: “We are not covering up our mistakes. The priority is to protect the people in Afghanistan and then open it up to the public. We need to say a certain amount are out of danger.”
On the indefinite injunction, he added: “I didn’t think it was the right thing to do; I didn’t think it was necessary.
“I said, ‘we’re not doing that.’ The only thing we’re going to do, is we need to basically hold off in public until we get to the bottom of the threat these people are under. I said we won’t cover up our mistakes; we’ll talk about them.”
The rules surrounding a superinjunction forbid even mentioning its existence.
Wallace said: “You can have an injunction, I think, without reporting the contents … a superinjunction; my understanding is you can’t even say there’s an injunction. I think I would never have been in that space. Public bodies are accountable. If necessary you could even ring up the journalist and say ‘please hold off, people are at risk.’ Most journalists don’t want to put people at risk.”
The superinjunction was applied by a judge shortly after Wallace had left government.
It came after the MoD applied to the High Court for a regular injunction.
Grant Shapps, the subsequent defense secretary, then maintained the gagging order until the 2024 general election, when the Labour opposition took government.
Wallace blamed the 2022 breach on negligence, adding: “Someone didn’t do their job.”
The former defense secretary had implemented new checking procedures in the ministry after another Afghan data breach, but that “that clearly didn’t happen on this occasion; someone clearly didn’t do their job,” he told MPs.
Wallace said that military and defense spending is not a priority for voters, “partly because they don’t know” the true nature of the threat facing Britain.
