Indian authorities prepared to evacuate tens of thousands of people threatened by fresh rains and flooding to higher ground on Monday as the death toll in the havoc wrecked by the annual monsoon crossed 150. Storms and torrential rain killed about 220 people in neighbouring Pakistan during the weekend, most in its biggest city of Karachi, and more bad weather was forecast for the region.

The thunderstorms and overflowing rivers have left thousands of villages without basic services like water and power since Friday and hundreds of miles of roads and rail tracks were under water in the worst-hit southern state of Andhra Pradesh. At least 38 people have died in the state and seven road labourers were missing, officials said. But there was some respite for the badly hit district town of Kurnool, sandwiched between two rivers, as waters began receding on Sunday. "I have never seen flooding in both rivers for over half-a-century," said Chandrasekhar Kalkura, who owns a hotel in the town of around 200,000 people.

Weather officials forecast more heavy rains on the eastern and western coasts of India, with a storm in the Bay of Bengal forecast to hit Andhra Pradesh by Wednesday morning. "The depression will cause heavy rains and strong winds," Andhra Pradesh weather official V.L. Prasada Rao said. In the neighbouring state of Karnataka, at least 29 people have been killed over the weekend after being swept away by flood waters or hit by lightning or having their house collapse.

Further north, two slumdwellers were killed late on Sunday in a landslide in India's financial capital of Mumbai in the western state of Maharashtra, where TV stations have reported over 50 deaths due to heavy rains over the past four days. Photographs on front pages of newspapers showed residents of Mumbai wading through knee or ankle-deep water, with some taking patients to hospital through the muck and a policeman sitting in a station in ankle-deep water.

Flights were delayed and train services disrupted. Media reports also said 38 people had been killed in the southern coastal state of Kerala, visited by thousands of foreign tourists each year. Hundreds of people are killed each year in India during the annual monsoon season -- vital for the country's agriculture -- and hundreds of thousands are displaced from their homes, which often collapse due to floods and strong winds.
(Additional reporting by Krittivas Mukherjee, Planet Ark, 26/06/2007)