Attachments
Glide No: FL-2022-000217-BGD
IFRC Secretariat funding requirement: 7.5 million CHF
Federation-wide funding requirement: 10.0 million CHF
DESCRIPTION OF THE EVENT
Since May 2022, heavy monsoon rains and mountain runoff from upstream in India's north-east have inundated large parts of Bangladesh. The north-eastern Indian states, and particularly Cherrapunji, saw higher- than-average rain during mid-June, and the third- highest in the past 122 years.
More than 7.2 million people have been impacted and hundreds of thousand households are isolated by flood waters, while some families have taken shelter in open areas, on higher ground or in flood shelters. Among the many threats, this also produces acute threats to safety and security for women and girls. According to the Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief (MODMR). an estimated 481,827 people have been taken to shelters in a combined effort by the Army, Navy, Fire Service and local authorities.
The flooding has washed away infrastructure, farmlands, homes and livelihoods, and has displaced hundreds of thousands of people. More than 155,000 homes, numerous roads and essential infrastructure have been washed away. Health facilities at the Upazila (administrative region), union and community levels have been significantly impacted and many of these centres have been converted to makeshift/temporary shelters. In the adjacent districts of Sylhet and Sunamganj, in Bangladesh’s east, 68 people have died in the flooding, and by 20 June a total of 2,492 new cases of disease and injury had been recorded by the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS). Among these, 1,229 were acute watery diarrhoea (AWD), 99 cases of skin disease and 62 cases of acute respiratory infection (ARI). Ten individuals were struck by lightning and nine people reported drowned.
There is the possibility of additional disease outbreaks as the waters recede as well: 75 per cent of cases are AWD. And according to the WHO, in Southeast Asia in June 2022 there was a 46-per-cent increase in COVID-19 as well and Bangladesh was among the countries with more infections in that month. By 20 June, the national test positivity rate (TPR) stood at 15 per cent, compared to 0.8 per cent at the end of May.
UNICEF has also reported that 4 million people in north-eastern Bangladesh, including 1.6 million children, have been cut off by floods and are without fresh drinking water, putting them in danger of waterborne diseases. And more than 40,000 wells and 49,000 latrines have been damaged. In population centres, water points and sanitation facilities have thus become enormously overburdened too. In Sunamganj and Sylhet districts, most of the water and sanitation infrastructure has been inundated.
According to the BDRCS WASH cluster, women and adolescent girls are also facing acute difficulty accessing WASH resources, which has negative impacts on their reproductive health and menstrual hygiene. The flooding has also destroyed 75,000 hectares (185,000 acres) of paddy and 300,000 hectares (741,000 acres) of other crops such as maize, jute and vegetablesre. These floods are thus clearly exacerbating food insecurity in the north- eastern districts in general, and to date, 113,297 total hectares of croplands, mainly Aman (rice) paddy, seedbed, maize and vegetable and other cash crops, have been inundated. Public, private and household grain storage has been severely affected as well, further compromising food security. Livestock and fisheries have been affected too, as fish hatcheries and farms are washed away.