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Bombay's monsoon toll touches 80

The death toll from two days of torrential monsoon rains and landslides in India's commercial heart of Bombay rose to 80 on Friday, officials said.

Among the dead, 65 were victims of a killer mudslide that buried a shanty town in the northern suburb of Ghatkopar on Wednesday, when three people died in a smaller mudslide elsewhere and three more drowned on Bombay's swamped streets.

Officials said the casualty list mounted Thursday with nine people "sucked into overflowing drains and drowned" in the suburb of Thane.

The rain finally abated on Friday, after a 48-hour deluge that wreaked chaos in Bombay and other areas of western Maharashtra state, as well as neighbouring Gujarat, where at least five people died.

At the Ghatkopar landslide site, rescue officials feared more bodies lay buried under the mass of mud and rock.

"The toll is likely to rise and many more people are still trapped in the debris," said additional municipal commissioner Gautam Chatterjee.

Chatterjee said initial rescue operations had been hampered by continued rain and the location of the disaster.

"The access road to the site was a small passage which cut through a row of houses and only one person could pass through the route," Chatterjee said.

"It was only after we had demolished some houses that a proper access for vehicles could be worked out."

Municipal officials called in the military to help dig for bodies.

Another official involved in the rescue work who did not want to be named said at least 200 bodies could still be buried.

The majority of those killed were slum-dwellers living on a hillside. Slum dwellers account for 60 percent of the city's population of 12 million people.

The rains disrupted transport, power supplies and communications systems across the city, with schools and colleges acting as shelters for the stranded and homeless.

Office workers, who predominantly use the suburban rail network, had been stuck in trains for hours with flooded tracks making it impossible for them to walk to safety.

Meteorologists said the rains were caused by a low pressure area over the Bay of Bengal and the eastern coast of India.

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