MUMBAI (Reuters) – Heavy rains flooded roads and railways on Monday in India’s financial capital Mumbai, disrupting flights and forcing the closure of some schools and colleges, while swollen rivers elsewhere affected more than 2 million people.
Just before the morning rush hour, more than 300 mm (11.8 inches) of rain hit the city of 12 million people during the six hours to 7 a.m. (01:30 GMT), city officials said, with more heavy rain forecast for the end of the day. .
Passengers waded through knee-high waters that partially submerged vehicles in many areas as traffic built up on the city’s Expresso Leste and Oeste highways.
Water on the tracks forced railway authorities to cancel some long-distance trains, they said, while television footage showed some suburban passenger trains, a critical means of daily transport for millions of people, stopped on flooded tracks.
More than 250 flights were delayed and at least 30 canceled at the city’s airport, the website of tracking service Flightradar24 showed.
The heavy downpour came days after record rainfall in the capital, New Delhi, which caused the fatal collapse of an airport roof.
Torrential monsoon rains have triggered floods and landslides in northern and eastern India as well as the neighboring Himalayan nation of Nepal, where at least 11 people have died.
More than 2 million people have been affected by river flooding in northeastern Assam, where Kaziranga National Park, home to the rare one-horned rhinoceros, was inundated and six of the animals drowned, authorities said on Sunday.
State authorities said 66 people have died in flooding and rain-related incidents since May.
Floods also affected 31 villages in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, bordering Nepal, the state government said.
(Reporting by Dhwani Pandya and Sudipto Ganguly in Mumbai, Tora Agarwala in Guwahati, Saurabh Sharma and Shivam Patel in New Delhi; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
