Nearly 300,000 people have been evacuated in the past 48 hours from flood-hit areas of Pakistan’s Punjab province following the latest flood alerts by India, officials have said, bringing the total number of people displaced since last month to 1.3 million.
A new flood alert was shared with Pakistan by neighbouring India through diplomatic channels early on Wednesday, said Arfan Ali Kathia, director-general of Punjab’s Provincial Disaster Management Authority.
Floodwaters have submerged dozens of villages in Punjab’s Muzaffargarh district, after earlier inundating Narowal and Sialkot, both near the border with India.
Authorities are also struggling to divert overflowing rivers onto farmlands to protect major cities, as part of one of the largest rescue and relief operations in the history of Punjab, which straddles eastern Pakistan and northwestern India.
The flood alert on Wednesday was the second in 24 hours following heavy rains and water releases from dams in India.
Thousands of rescuers using boats are taking part in the relief and rescue operations, while the military has also been deployed to transport people and animals from inundated villages, said Kathia.
Rescuers are also using drones to find people stranded on rooftops in the flood-hit areas. Kathia said more than 3.3 million people across 33,000 villages in the province have been affected. The damage is still being assessed and all those who lost homes and crops would be compensated by the Punjab government, he said.
Landslides and flooding have killed at least 30 people in India’s Punjab state, home to more than 30 million people, and nearly 20,000 have been evacuated since August 1.
In Pakistan, tent villages are being set up and food and other essential items are being supplied to flood-affected people, said Kathia, though many survivors complained about a lack of government aid.
Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif visited flood-hit areas in Muzaffargarh on Wednesday, meeting with displaced families at the camps.
About 40,000 people are in the relief camps, according to the National Disaster Management Authority. It remains unclear where the rest are sheltering.
Malik Ramzan, a displaced resident, said he chose to stay near his inundated home rather than enter a relief camp. “There are no liveable facilities in the camps,” he said. “Food isn’t delivered on time, and we are treated like beggars.”
Facilities at the camps “are very poor,” said Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from Multan in Punjab. “There’s no clean drinking water, no proper toilet facilities, plus the fact that it’s very hot and humid, so it leads to dehydration.”
While these families have fans to keep cool in the heat, “there are frequent power breakdowns, so these people now are very vulnerable when it comes to their health and, of course, the outbreak of diseases.”
Last week’s flooding mainly hit districts in Kasur, Bahawalpur and Narowal.
Pakistan began mass evacuations last month after India released water from overflowing dams into low-lying border regions.
