But hopes that relief has arrived are soon dashed as the chopper, loaded with emergency supplies, turns away, its crew deciding for safety reasons against landing in driving rain.

"There is just nothing left to eat," said drenched farmer Ashish Thakur in submerged Kaanti village in Darbhanga district.

"Even the relief helicopters are not landing anymore," he said.

"People are fighting for food like dogs, I have no strength left," the farmer wept, hugging his two hungry children and shivering wife.

Darbhanga is among the 14 worst-hit districts in the poverty-ridden state of Bihar where nearly seven million people have been struck by annual monsoon floods that have engulfed thousands of villages.

"We anticipated some floods and stored some food stocks but it was impossible for us to imagine in advance that it would be so bad," Darbhanga administrator Upendra Sharma told AFP.

Some 700 of Darbhanga's 1,200 villages are "fully or partly submerged" affecting around 2.1 million people, the official said in his headquarters in Darbangha district town, where foliage-laden muddy water was surging in.

The annual monsoon regularly brings flooding to the subcontinent but this year has seen some of the worst in recent times, claiming over 1,100 lives.

The death toll caused by monsoon rains in India topped the 1,000 mark on Friday with new victims reported from northern Uttar Pradesh state, officials said.

Twenty-one deaths occurred overnight in three eastern Uttar Pradesh districts hardest hit by the heavy flooding, relief commissioner Umesh Sinha told AFP.

The figures brought to 1,028 the number of people reported killed nationwide in the annual torrential rains that begin in June and last until September, according to figures from officials and media reports.