Hospitals in eastern India were packed on Saturday with people suffering from waterborne diseases, and marooned villagers clashed with police as some of the worst floods in living memory ravaged South Asia.
More than 230 people have died over the past 11 days after torrential monsoon rains lashed the region, including much of Bangladesh, causing rivers to burst their banks.
About 10 million people are homeless or cut off in their villages, with little or no access to food and health care.
Health workers and aid groups in Assam in northeast India were working around the clock to treat and feed many of the 3 million people displaced or surrounded by flood waters in the state with the limited medicines and supplies available.
Elsewhere, villagers were getting desperate and hungry.
"Our family survived for a week on buffalo milk but now the animal has stopped producing milk as it has gone without food for days," said Meghu Yadav, a villager in the Samastipur district of impoverished Bihar state.
Many people were suffering from diarrhoea, dysentery and fever, and in Assam hospital wards in affected areas were full.
Officials have warned of outbreaks of malaria. On Friday the United Nations Children's Fund said the scale of the disaster posed an "unprecedented challenge" for aid workers.
"The victims are left to survive on their own," an aid worker with an Indian voluntary agency that is supervising relief work in Assam told Reuters in Guwahati, the state's main city.
Although it had stopped raining in the state on Saturday, further downpours were forecast for early next week.
And for many farmers the end of the floods is only the beginning of their misery: receding water has left a thick layer of silt over thousands of hectares of land and no new rice crop will be possible until next year.
