The government, which says it has sufficient reserves of relief material to meet current demand, said it would assess the situation before making an appeal for help with post-flood rehabilitation, the private UNB news agency said.

But flood victims in many places said relief had yet to arrive, forcing them to drink sewage-polluted water and prompting fears of an epidemic of water-borne diseases.

The floods, which hit on July 10, have left 30 million people homeless or cut off out of a total population of 140 million, the official news agency BSS said this week.

The death toll in the floods rose Wednesday to 394, the agency said.

Millions of people are now in dire need of clean water, food and medicine, news reports and relief groups said.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has started distributing rice, water purification tablets and other relief to flood hit people in central and northern Bangladesh, a WFP spokeswoman in the capital Dhaka said.

The WFP warned this week that Bangladesh "could face a major humanitarian crisis" in coming days and said it was preparing to distribute 3,000 tonnes of rice to people in the north and centre of the country.

"There are millions of people out there without enough food or clean water," the spokeswoman said.

"We cannot get to them all at once but we have started the distribution process. We hope that our efforts combined with the efforts of other organisations and the government relief programme will be able to reduce the suffering."

At a shelter at Goran, east of Dhaka, no aid has been received despite "repeated requests", said Shamsul Islam Iqbal, a local political leader running relief efforts.

"At first we got by on what my husband earned but now he is down with disease after pulling rickshaw in filth and dirt," a weeping mother named Morjina told the Daily Star newspaper.

A woman with a sick seven-month-old baby said she had not received any aid despite waiting at the centre for a week. "Give us food. We don't want blabbering," she said.

Another woman said she had received water purification tablets but was asked to share the packet with three other families. "So many people came down with diarrhoea, the saline (water purification tablets) came to little use," she said.

The flooding, which has also claimed hundreds of lives in other parts of South Asia including northeastern India and Nepal, is the heaviest to hit Bangladesh since the country's worst ever floods of 1998.

If, as forecast, there were further rains this week, the flooding could last until mid-September, the English-language daily News Today said, quoting Meteorological Office sources.

Half of the capital Dhaka has been submerged by stinking sewage-contaminated flood water with streets turned into rivers and boats replacing cycle rickshaws as the main means of transport.

Low-lying Bangladesh, which is criss-crossed by 230 rivers including major arteries carrying melting snow from the Himalayas, suffers annual flooding affecting at least 20 percent of the country.

Officials say the flood waters in the northeast are starting to recede but that there will be more flooding in central Bangladesh as the dispersing waters move downstream.

High tides in the Bay of Bengal mean the water is not expected to disperse into the bay for at least a week and the situation could be exacerbated by further monsoon rain.

TERRA.WIRE