Bihar Dy CM, family rescued

Patna/Lucknow: Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Modi and his family were among hundreds of people in Patna who were stranded in their homes after the city was pounded by rain, the heaviest in two decades.

Modi was taken in an orange, inflatable rubber boat along with other people. Private hospitals, medical stores and other shops in Patna were submerged in waist-deep water. Visuals showed flooding at Nalanda Medical College Hospital, the second largest healthcare facility in the city.

A bird's eye view of Patna made the city appear like a huge lake dotted with concrete structures. Posh low-lying areas like Rajendra Nagar and Pataliputra Colony were flooded.

"The rains have stopped but there is waterlogging in many areas," Bihar's Additional Secretary in the Disaster Relief Department Amod Kumar Sharan said.

The weather office, however, has warned of more rain in the 24 districts in state in the next 24 hours. Schools in Patna are closed till Tuesday.

The death toll in rain-related incidents mounting to 134 in the country.

The weather department has forecast a long delayed withdrawal of Monsoon and more rains for Patna, where several areas still remain submerged due to heavy rainfall over the past three days.

The Bihar disaster management department said the state government has urged the air force to send a helicopter for air-dropping of food packets and other relief material in the marooned areas.

Though there was a let up in rainfall in the morning, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has predicted showers later on Monday in the Bihar capital.

Since Thursday, 93 people have died in Uttar Pradesh in rain-related incidents, with the state government on Sunday cancelling leave of officials in view of the situation.

In Jharkhand, three members of a family died in Dumka district after a wall collapsed on them following heavy rains in the region. Besides these states, as many as 13 deaths were reported on Saturday from Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

In Gujarat, three women drowned after their car was swept away at a flooded causeway in Rajkot district on Sunday following heavy rains in several parts of the Saurashtra region.

Is Bihar a victim of cimate change?

Bihar CM Nitish Kumar said even the weather department was "clueless". "It is nature's fury before which man is often helpless. We are, however, trying our best.

The problem is we have no idea how long the downpour which caps a prolonged dry spell causing a drought-like situation is going to last. Even the weather department seems clueless, making different predictions at different points of time," he said.

But is the rainfall so severe and how much of the floods are actually due to climate change?

Scientists point out that extreme rainfall events are on the rise in the country, as are longer dry spells with more intense rainfall concentrated in just a few days.

A 2017 study by researchers at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology said there was a "threefold increase in widespread extreme rain events over central India during 1950–2015" and that this was due to the "increasing variability of the low-level monsoon westerlies over the Arabian Sea, driving surges of moisture supply, leading to extreme rainfall episodes across the entire central subcontinent."

As of September 30, the average rainfall received in the month was at 247.1 mm — 48% above the normal, the third-highest in the IMD's records since 1901.