Vehicles damaged by floods lay on the national highway near Barmer town, 350 km (218 miles) north of the western Indian city of Ahmedabad.
REUTERS/Amit Dave
India's floods hit lowest castes hardest as malaria fears grow, and China's dam debate rages...
Massive monsoon flooding in southern and western India has killed more than 500 people and left millions homeless. But with hundreds still missing, aid agencies believe the death toll will soar into the thousands.
Relief workers, distributing food, fresh water and medical supplies to flood victims, are particularly concerned about the plight of the Dalits, or so-called "untouchables", who are at the bottom of the Hindu caste system and live on the fringes or society.
"We are paying special attention to Dalit and tribal communities who are often overlooked in emergencies," says Jagat Patnaik, who is managing ActionAid's flood response operations.
He says they are particularly concerned about Dalits living in the Barmer desert region of Rajasthan, which has seen its worst floods in at least three decades (see below). They are also trying to reach Dalits in the low-lying riverside areas downstream from Ahmedabad in Gujarat. Patnaik believes 10 percent or more of people affected in these two flood-hit regions are Dalits.
Dalits, who do the most menial types of work, often live some distance from other communities.
In most emergencies aid is largely delivered to towns and other places along main roads and simply doesn't reach the Dalits. Local discrimination also prevents them getting aid.
"This is something we saw in the tsunami," says ActionAid spokeswoman Hannah Crabtree. "They just didn't get the aid. It just never made it to them. Aid gets stuck in the easier to access areas."
Many Dalits, like those on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, work as agricultural labourers, yet because they don't actually own any land it is more difficult for them to receive compensation when flooding wipes out crops.
After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, fishing communities discriminated against the Dalits, refusing to share emergency shelters and denying them access to communal taps and toilets.
And it wasn't just the locals who sidelined them. Aid operations focussed their attention on helping the coastal fishing communities who had lost homes, boats and nets. The nearby Dalit communities, who packaged and transported the fish, and had therefore also lost their livelihood, were forgotten.
Malaria fears
Imagine seeing two years of rain in the space of just three days.
It's a mind-boggling thought, but that's the fate that befell Barmer last week - a sprawling desert region in western India more accustomed to drought than floods.
Many people had to be rescued by helicopters and dinghies after becoming marooned on top of sand dunes surrounded by water over five metres (15 feet) deep. Hundreds of thousands are now displaced.
"The desert looks like a sea," commented one army officer involved in relief operations.
The trouble is the brownish waters are not seeping away because there is a layer of the mineral gypsum below the sandy surface.
This isn't just slowing down relief efforts, but poses a malaria risk if mosquitoes start breeding in stagnant flood water.
"The water doesn't soak out so there's water logging and there's a large danger of malaria," ActionAid's Jagat Patnaik told AlertNet.
A government official said they would have to puncture the gypsum layer if the water didn't drain away.
Emma Batha
AlertNet journalist
Dammed if you do...
China's worst drought in half a century has left more than 18 million people short of drinking water and destroyed swathes of cropland. Things are especially bad in the parched southwest, where the harshest conditions since meteorological records began in 1891 are sending vegetable prices soaring.
In April, China completed construction of the controversial Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydroelectricity project. Coincidence? Many activists don't think so, seeing a direct link between water shortages and the $25 billion plugging of the Yangtze River.
The authorities are now on the defensive. "The abnormalities are caused by global warming and the overall change in the world's climate," the Inter Press News Agency quotes one official as saying in a recent story. "It has nothing to do with the completion and operation of the Three Gorges Dam."
The case against the project goes like this: By damming China's longest river, engineers have effectively changed the climate of the whole region, leading to a decrease in rainfall. Beijing counters that the dam will bring an end to the devastating flooding that has long been the Yangtze's trademark.
Whatever the truth, China's dam debate doesn't stop there. As officials ponder the possibility of diverting relatively abundant southern rivers to the north, where water tables are perilously low, we now have the news that more than a third of the country's existing 85,000 dams suffer defects from aging and could be threatened by flooding.
E Jingping, secretary-general of the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, said in an interview on the government's official website that while China had become better at withstanding floods and storms, decrepit old dams built in the 1950s and '60s were his biggest worry.
"What I fear most is dam collapse, and I think it's not just me," he said. "Party and state leaders at every level fear this. China has more than 85,000 dams and over a third suffer from defects. If there's ever heavy rain, it's extremely dangerous."
Typhoons and tropical storms frequently wallop south China and surrounding regions from early summer through late autumn.
So rain or shine, the dam controversy is certain to continue.
Tim Large
AlertNet deputy editor
Any views expressed in this newsblog are those of the authors and not of Reuters.
