Charities plead for India flood aid

More than 10,000 villages have been flooded

By South Asia correspondent Jill McGivering

International aid agencies are appealing to Western governments for emergency funds to help the Indian state of Orissa, where an estimated seven million people have been affected by severe flooding.

Charities including Save the Children, Oxfam and Action Aid say at least one million people desperately need emergency relief.

About 500,000 villagers in remote areas are still thought to be totally cut off by flood waters.

Many say they still have not received food or medical supplies.

Heavy rain continued in the region on Sunday.

It is now almost a week since the floods inundated many parts of Orissa, leading to the deaths of more than 40 people.

Many communities are still trying to rebuild in the aftermath of the cyclone which devastated this region less than two years ago.

Because of poverty in the region, many victims were weak or malnourished even before the floods.

Road protest

In one coastal district, we came across a group of villagers staging a protest on the road, demanding help.

They said 600 people were still stranded in their village with no means of escape.

Some families had been without food for several days now, they said, and had very little clean drinking water.

Emergency relief operations have been going on for days - a combination of aid agencies and Indian armed forces, who are making about 20 helicopter trips a day to drop sacks of food to the more remote areas.

Many people are stranded

But the scale of need is vast, and many stranded villagers say they are desperate for help.

Many water sources have become contaminated and standpipes have been totally submerged.

Orissa is one of India's poorest states, and many people here have no resources to sustain them when disaster strikes.

Destruction

An estimated 20,000 houses in the state have been destroyed, many more are partly flooded.

Makeshift shelters, some barely more than plastic sheeting, are being built along embankments and patches of high ground.

Aid is being distributed, but it is a slow, difficult process. Many roads and bridges have been washed away and the worst affected areas are only accessible by boat.

Whole districts have disappeared.

There are now signs that the flood water is starting to recede but that too will be a slow process.