More than a million affected by massive floods

Even as we are on the Hurricane Gustav watch, India's northern state of Bihar is reeling from massive floods. Well, Nepal too.
AFP reports that "More than 400,000 people have been evacuated in an operation involving local authorities, emergency workers and the army, disaster management ... Another 800,000 people have made their own way out and sought shelter in overcrowded relief centres set up by the government or in concrete buildings and temples, officials in Bihar said, but at least one million remain stranded."

Bihar has been a tragic story for decades. It is probably the least developed state, with the highest level of corruption and violence. A classmate of mine, Vijay Nambisan, wrote a book on Bihar a few years ago. A columnist quotes Vijay: Probably one of the best intros to Bihar could be the book by Vijay Nambisan, Bihar. "No one who has seen the Ganga plain after the monsoon and the annual flood, who has seen what it produces despite more than 2,000 years of intensive cultivation, can think that the state of Bihar is a poor one. The soil is incredibly fertile: Poke in a seed and it sprouts," writes the author.
Cut to the tale of Pushpa, thin, dark and short-statured who tells Vijay's wife, Kavery, "Why should I worry about that? I will be dead by 40."
Vijay comments: "It seemed incredible that a woman in her mid-20s, in the year of grace one thousand nine hundred ninety-seven, in a democratic republic which purports to guarantee the welfare of all its citizens, could make such a statement. The most horrible thing about it, of course, was that it was true."