Indian troops on flood alert

Concern is growing for more than three million people affected by the worst floods for fifty years in the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Kerala.

The Indian army and navy are on high alert because of a new threat of flooding, and the authorities in Andhra Pradesh , where rainfall levels are fifty per cent up on normal monsoon amounts, say the Godavari river is on the verge of bursting its banks and washing away hundreds of villages.

More than twenty-thousand people in low-lying coastal districts have been moved to higher ground.

Meanwhile medical officials in the north-eastern state of Assam are trying to contain outbreaks of malaria and water-borne disease which they say have already killed seventy people.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service