A CHARITY has mounted a massive aid effort to help millions of families in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, where flooding caused by monsoon rains has killed more than 1000 people.

Christian Aid is using £45,000 of emergency funds and £200,000 from Irish Aid and a Department for International Development-backed fund to provide 4000 households with hygiene kits, tarpaulin, shelter materials and community water filters to give them safe drinking water.

It is also teaching 20,000 families about good hygiene practices to help protect them from disease.

Madara Hettiarachchi, Christian Aid’s head of humanitarian programmes for Asia and the Middle East, said she hoped people would not forget those in South Asia while the floods in Texas were dominating the news agenda.

“These are some of the worst floods we’ve seen in South Asia in decades and the impact is likely only going to get worse,” she said.

“Farms and livestock have been washed away so food security is going to be a huge problem in the coming days and we will likely see the death toll rise.

“The good news is we are reaching people and bringing them the vital help they need to stay alive and begin to rebuild their lives.

“We’ve all seen the terrible impact floodwater is having in Texas and that is in a country with ‘first-world’ infrastructure. The people in South Asia are much less equipped to cope with such a deluge of floodwater which is why they are in such a precarious position.”

She added that scientists were increasingly confident of the links between such events and climate change.

“Research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggests that the most extreme rain events in most regions of the world will increase in intensity by 3-15 per cent, and some places – such as parts of the Asian monsoon region – would experience greater increases.

“It is a reminder that we must respond to the immediate humanitarian needs in South Asia while at the same time decarbonising the global economy in order to reduce the likelihood of such events from happening again.

“Until we start to address the underlying causes of climate breakdown we will continue to see more human suffering on a massive scale.”

Officials in Pakistan’s biggest city Karachi said monsoon rain had left at least eight people dead, following the days-long downpours in neighbouring India which caused death and destruction in Mumbai, India’s financial capital.

Karachi streets were flooded and normal life disrupted in the port city, with people in some areas left wading through waist-high water.

Mayor Wasim Akhtar said authorities were working to help those affected by the rains.

Pakistan’s largest Edhi ambulance service said it took the bodies of eight people to hospital who were either electrocuted or killed by collapsing walls.

According to Pakistan’s meteorological department, rain will continue for three days in various parts of Sindh province, where authorities closed schools as a precaution. Wind storms and rain were also expected in south-west Baluchistan and eastern Punjab provinces.

The United Nations estimated that at least 41 million people had been directly affected by flooding and landslides caused by monsoon rains in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. Rescuers yesterday ended the search for survivors under the rubble of a collapsed apartment building that killed 33 people in Mumbai.

Workers had been using earth-moving equipment to lift concrete slabs and cement blocks, but there was no-one left missing after the debris was cleared, said firefighting officer Bhaskar Pawar.

The 117-year-old building was declared unsafe six years ago, but nine families were still living there.

A nursery school had also continued to operate on the first floor, although it had not opened for the day when the building collapsed. Officials said torrential rains that caused city-wide flooding this week had probably triggered the collapse.

A 20-day-old boy was among those killed. Police are still trying to identify the victims but said workers may have been present in ground-floor warehouses when the building fell. Three fire officers were among the 13 being treated for injuries at a Mumbai hospital.

Thousands of buildings in Mumbai are more than a century old, but their foundations are weakened by years of heavy rains during the June-September monsoon season. Thursday’s collapse was the second building in the city to fall in recent weeks, after a four-storey building toppled in the suburb of Ghatkopar last month, killing 17 people.

Building collapses are commonplace in India, and are mostly caused by shoddy construction materials or lax oversight of building regulations.

With property and rental prices soaring in Mumbai, some builders have added unauthorised extra floors. Floodwaters were receding yesterday, and some public buses had started running again.