By Chloe Farand From Independent UK

‘We live in a global world and there is a lot going on out there at the moment but people should know about what is happening here,’ Red Cross worker says

More than 40 million people have been affected by devastating floods and landslides in South Asia, UN humanitarian agencies have said.

Torrential monsoon rains have killed at least 1,200 people and left millions fleeing their homes in India, Bangladesh and Nepal over the last fortnight.

Governments and aid agencies are working to bring clean water, food, shelter and medical aid to people affected as tens of thousands of homes, schools and hospitals have been destroyed.

Infrastructure such as roads, bridges, railways and airports have been damaged by the floods, sometimes leaving entire areas inaccessible and vast swathes of farmland have been washed away.

According to the latest figures form the UN, more than 32 million people have been affected in India, 6.9 million in Bangladesh and 1.7 million in Nepal, bringing the total to around 41 million people.

Hundreds of thousands of people have found refuge in emergency shelters, with numbers expected to grow.

Figures from the Red Cross released on Tuesday put the numbers of affected people in Bangladesh even higher, at 8.6 million, with over 3.5 million homes damaged or destroyed.

Nearly 2,000 local medical teams have been deployed as one third of the country is believed to be under water.

Hanna Butler, from the International Federation of Red Cross, has been giving assistance to people in the eastern state of Bihar, a rural part of India where many people live off subsistence farming and one of the areas worst affected by the flooding.

She told The Independent: “People have been shaken by the huge flooding. This is an area where people are used to a bit of flooding but people said this is on a different scale. The older people have been comparing it to the last big floods of the late 1980s but younger people said they had never experienced anything like this before.

“There was no warning and downpours started one night. People had to escape and fled their homes with only what they could carry. People are on survival mode and they are only thinking about tomorrow but reconstruction will be slow.

“We live in a global world and there is a lot going on out there at the moment but people should know about what is happening in India, Bangladesh and Nepal.”

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