Villagers return home to ruins in flood-hit India

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NEW DELHI, Aug 13 (AFP): Villagers returned home to ruins as flood waters continued to recede Monday but the toll from the annual monsoon flooding across South Asia rose to 2,300, officials said.
Tens of thousands are still housed in shelters while millions more are dependent on food and medical aid but displaced people began heading home in India, at least to check out what remains of their homes.
Dukhia Manjhi, who has been living in a plastic-covered hut in a district in the north of India's worst-hit Bihar state, where 15 million people were affected, made a reconnaissance trip to his village ahead of the weekend.
"Nothing -- there's nothing to go back to," said Manhji, whose first name means "sorrowful," back at the relief camp in the district of Samastipur, 160 kilometres (90 miles) north of state capital Patna.
"The floods have washed away the fertile soil and there's nothing to rebuild our home."
In Bihar alone, almost 80,000 houses were partially or totally damaged and more than 1.1 million hectares (2.71 million acres) of crops submerged after heavy rains saw rivers burst their banks.
Bihar has asked the Indian government for 800 million dollars of aid and promised to compensate farmers and citizens but development agencies say the recovery effort will be daunting.
"So many people have lost their homes and these are mostly the poorest of the poor. Re-establishing their livelihoods is going to be a major issue," said Vinoy Ohdar, Bihar head for global anti-poverty agency ActionAid.
Some 50 people died in the state at the weekend and the home ministry's disaster management division Sunday put the toll across India since the start of the monsoon at 1,752.
One of the victims in Bihar was a man beaten to death by police Sunday after he joined a protest to demand food at a relief centre in Bihar's Saharsa district, local official Niranjan Kumar Choudhry said.