Seventeen members of the same Indian family were found dead Wednesday as floodwaters receded from a village in Gujarat, officials said, as the death toll from the state-wide disaster climbed above 110. “They seem to have drowned in the floodwaters. The bodies were found buried in muck,” A B Parmar, a police inspector at the scene, told AFP, adding the deceased were from the same family.
A senior Gujarati government official, Pankaj Kumar, confirmed the discovery of the bodies in Banaskantha district. Gujarat’s state emergency authority said Wednesday at least 12 other bodies were found overnight as rescue crews sifted through communities devastated by heavy monsoon flooding.
The official death toll from the floods in the westernmost state stands at 111, with more than 36,000 people evacuated to safe areas as helicopters and boats try to reach those still stranded. Prime Minister Narendra Modi surveyed the devastation across Gujarat from the skies Tuesday, urging people across his home state to remain resilient.
Apart from Gujarat, the northeastern states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam have been hard-hit by monsoon flooding, while pockets of the eastern states of Odisha and Bihar have also been affected. In Assam at least 75 people have been killed and a state-wide emergency relief operation has been underway since April. Tens of thousands of acres of crops have been destroyed.
