Uttar Pradesh floods: 16,784 evacuated, three dead, 23 districts still under water

Uttar Pradesh officials said on 3 September that 16,784 people have been taken to safer ground since the present flood pulse began, 3,042 of them on 2 September alone. Three people have died in rain-related incidents: 18-month-old Priyansh in Pratapgarh, and Shera, 32, and Suresh, 55, in Gajraula in Amroha. Thirty-five districts have seen floodwater at some point. Twenty-three were still listed as affected on Wednesday evening, among them Prayagraj, Varanasi, Ghazipur, Ballia, Ayodhya, Lakhimpur Kheri, Pilibhit, Shahjahanpur and Sonbhadra.

The state has put 1,499 boats and motorboats on the water and 1,067 medical teams on the ground. It has opened 1,311 flood shelters, 201 of them in use. Relief desks have taken 442 cases of damaged houses. Livestock losses are put at 36,287 animals. Those are government figures. They move every evening. They do not yet include a full crop loss number for every district.

Chitrakoot is the sharp local picture. About 14,000 people were reported affected there as the Mandakini stayed high. The 42nd Battalion of the Provincial Armed Constabulary pulled about 150 people out of Chaura village by motorboat. Ballia, where the Ganga and the Saryu have both risen, has about 20,500 people affected and 83 boats working. Kanpur saw the Pandu overtop into Barra 8. The photographs from those three places are the same photograph: water in the lane, a child in a plastic tub, a boat where the road was.

Farrukhabad was on the chief minister’s Thursday list. Yogi Adityanath was due to land by helicopter at the police line ground, spend about 40 minutes, hand 1,000 relief kits to flood-hit families, and give land titles and housing money to 31 households that lost their homes. District notes say about 70 villages are under the Ganga there, 19,295 families and 78,671 people are surrounded, 7,200 hectares of crop are damaged, and 127 rural houses are gone. The river was 10 centimetres above the warning level when those notes were written.

The IMD has not signalled an end. Isolated heavy rain was forecast in west Uttar Pradesh on 4 September, with very heavy pockets in the east and west on 2 and 3 September. That forecast is why the evacuation number is still climbing rather than falling. A shelter that empties on a sunny morning fills again if the next upstream gauge jumps overnight.

This pulse is separate from the Nepal-Tibet flood that sent unusual fish down the Gandak into Bihar, a story already on the record in Patna. The Uttar Pradesh water is monsoon water on the Ganga, the Yamuna tributaries, the Ghaghara-Saryu and the Mandakini. It is the ordinary late-season flood, at an unordinary scale across 23 live districts. The death count is still low relative to the number of people moved, which is what a working boat fleet is for. The risk that remains is a second crest while the first lot of families are still on school floors.

Readers should watch three numbers over the next 48 hours: the evacuation total, the Ganga reading at Farrukhabad and Ballia, and whether the death list stays at three. If the river falls 10 centimetres, Yogi’s kits become the story. If it rises 10 centimetres, the kits will be handed out in deeper water.