Half the deaths were in Mumbai, a city of 15 million where three days of torrential rains have disrupted rail, road and air travel, said a relief official in the western state of Maharashtra. “The figures could still rise as we are still collecting details,”he said.

Rescuers were trying to recover the bodies of an estimated 100 people buried under an avalanche of mud in a village 150 km (95 miles) south of Mumbai. Phone links in Mumbai were still patchy, schools remained shut and many commuters were stranded for a third day yesterday as most trains and buses were cancelled. The airport, India’s busiest, remained closed with the runway under water.

<B>Treacherous walk home</B>

Cars were abandoned in the north of the city and thousands of commuters who opted not to make a long, treacherous walk home on Wednesday, had to spend a second night in offices or hotels.

News channels carried hundreds of rolling text messages from worried family members trying to get in touch with loved ones. “Mumbai is improving, but traffic is still slow. Things should be normal by afternoon provided rains stop flooding streets,” a relief official at the flood control centre said. Trading on Mumbai’s stock, bond and currency markets was shut. As on Wednesday, the Maharashtra state government called a holiday for yesterday, advising people to stay home. Rescuers searched in the rain for more bodies in the village of Juigaon, 150 km (90 miles) south of Mumbai where between 100 and 150 people were believed caught in a mudslide on Tuesday. “About 100 have died,”Krishna Vatsa, the state relief secretary, told Reuters. “The relief operation is continuing.”

Vatsa had not yet heard of any survivors. Another landslide in Mumbai’s Andheri suburb killed 36 people. The army, navy and air force have been called in to help relief workers air-drop food packets to stranded people, as floodwaters swept the Maharashtra coast.

<B>Chaos </B>

One area in the north of Mumbai received a record-breaking 94 cm (37 inches) of rainfall on Tuesday. More heavy rains are forecast for the next two days, state officials said. Limited train services were running in Mumbai and electricity has been restored in most places.

Thousands of people had to be evacuated and tens of thousands more were stranded as floodwaters raged through the city’s streets on Wednesday. People forced to stay in offices and hotels for two nights shopped for clothes and thronged restaurants and bars, and several cash machines ran out of money. Taxis and buses were scarce. Airport officials hoped at least one runway at the Mumbai airport would be ready to resume operations soon. “But it all depends on the weather. Visibility is still poor and we are hoping it improves by noon,” Sudhir Kumar, director of the airport, told Reuters.

Flights to Mumbai had been suspended since Tuesday afternoon after the runway was flooded in the rains. The chaos was a tough reminder of the inadequacies of Mumbai’s infrastructure, despite a hugely ambitious $ 6 billion plan to turn it into a “new Shanghai”. Flooding in the monsoon season in India, which runs from June to September, kills hundreds of people each year and disrupts life across the country.

OIL AND NATURAL GAS CORPORATION

<B>Ten die and hundreds rescued in oil fire</B>

■ Ten people died and 367 were rescued after fire destroyed an oil platform off India’s west coast, and officials said yesterday it may take a year to rebuild a platform that produced a seventh of the country’s oil. An official at platform owner Oil and Natural Gas Corp. (ONGC) said India’s largest energy explorer would try to restore part of the 100,000-barrel-per-day output in a few months at the platform in the Bombay High offshore oil field. Coast Guard officials said several helicopters, six navy and two coast guard ships, and many civilian vessels were scouring very rough seas in bad weather for any survivors of the fire. “We have picked up people from the sea and there were people who were in the water for more than 12 hours,” Madanjit Singh, vice-admiral of the Western Naval Command, told a news conference. Rough seas had pushed a nearby support vessel into the platform, which started a fire that burned the platform, thesupport vessel and a nearby rig, Singh said. The platform sank. The navy said at least 10 people have died. Six divers remain trapped in the support vessel, and one or two people are missing, while 367 people have been rescued, the navy said. ONGC said it would take a while to restore production. “After the rainy season ends in September, we may build sub-sea pipelines to a nearby platform,” an ONGC official, who did not want to be named, told Reuters. He said the company would have to build a new platform in the Bombay High offshore oil field to restore normal output. “This can take a year.” The sunken platform is about 160 km (100 miles) southwest of India’s financial hub, Bombay, where heavy rains and severe flooding have already stretched emergency services.

About 225 people were working on the platform when fire broke out at about 4:30 p.m. (1100 GMT) on Wednesday. Some people jumped into lifeboats to escape the flames and get to platforms nearby. Rescue operations were hampered as ONGC’s helicopters in Bombay were grounded because of floods. Bombay High, India’s largest offshore field, produces 14 percent of the oil India consumes and accounts for 38 percent of all domestic production. The platform’s production of 100,000 barrels per day is out of a total Bombay High production of 260,000 barrels per day. ONGC engineers live on the BHN platform, which is connected to 15 oil wells and pumps oil to the coast. It is fixed to the seabed 80 metres (265 feet) below the surface of the Arabian Sea. Aiyar said other platforms in the field continued to function normally.

Platforms tend to be 2-3 kilometres apart. An ONGC official said on Thursday there was unlikely to have been an oil spill as a result of the fire because the systems would have automatically shut down, and any oil or gas that did leak would have probably been consumed by the flames. The field was discovered by a Russian and Indian oil exploration team during the mapping of the Gulf of Cambay in 1964-1967. The first well was sunk in 1974. The field, where workers tend to do shifts of about two weeks at a time, attained a peak production of 400,000 barrels of oil per day from 1985 to 1989. To arrest the decline from its most prolific field, ONGC invested 85 billion rupees ($2 billion) to redevelop the field from 2001. ONGC is India’s largest company by value, with a market capitalisation of about $32 billion.