Rains maroon thousands in eastern India

By Bappa Majumdar

KOLKATA, India (Reuters) - Thousands of people in eastern India were marooned for a fourth straight day on Friday as torrential rains hampered relief work, and in neighboring Bangladesh two people were killed by landslides.

Close to 700 people have died in South Asia due to heavy rains and storms over the past fortnight. While the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan has eased, parts of India and Bangladesh continued to suffer downpours.

Several thousand people in the Indian state of West Bengal remained cut off from the rest of the country after surging rivers, triggered by an overnight storm, broke through mud embankments and swamped villages.

Civic authorities have been completely overwhelmed with relief work and faced public ire in many places.

In Bangladesh's southeastern Cox's Bazar area, landslides triggered by heavy rain killed at least two people and injured 11, police said. Rescuers were searching for more people at several other sites where hills collapsed, burying homes.

Heavy rains continued to fall in and around the area on Friday, slowing rescue efforts.

In Kolkata, east India's biggest commercial city and the capital of West Bengal, health workers traveled in boats to distribute medicine to the affected people.

Residents held angry protests, demanding clean drinking water. "The water lines are underwater and dirty water has seeped into them leaving us no choice," said businessman Rajesh Dubey.

Many residents were seen cooking in knee-deep water in their kitchens Kolkata, a teeming city of over 8 million.

The city faced the prospect of more rains as a storm hovered 50 km (30 miles) to its north, threatening to burst over the city, weather officials warned.

DAM WOES

International anti-poverty group ActionAid accused the government of mismanaging the disaster.

"Deaths and losses due to the current floods across several states in the country cannot only be attributed to rains but also to mismanagement of water levels in big and small dams," the group said in a statement.

It said there was already a warning that as many as 41 reservoirs across the country were choking with excess water and could result in disastrous floods, especially in the western and southern belt of the country.

In the western state of Gujarat, also hit by heavy rains, an endangered Asiatic lion and 85 rare blackbuck deer drowned in protected reserves over the last two days, forestry officials said.

(Additional reporting by Nurul Islam in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh and Rupam Jain Nair in Ahmedabad, India)