Hundreds of people are feared dead in western India after one of the heaviest downpours in history fell on the suburbs of Bombay yesterday.

At least 99 people are confirmed to have been killed and hundreds are missing in landslides and rising waters after 94.4cm (37.1in) of rain deluged Bombay yesterday, more than falls on London in a year.

Soldiers have been sent to the city to help the recovery, after the extraordinary rains, the heaviest on record in India, destroyed communication lines, stranded thousands of people, closed airports and shut down India's financial centre.

The two main roads to Bombay, which has 15 million inhabitants, were overwhelmed yesterday and buses ground to a halt as the waters rose. Commuters waded home and tourists were trapped at the city's airport, the busiest in India, as aircraft sat on waterlogged runways.

"Most places in India don’t receive this kind of rainfall in a year. This is the highest ever recorded in India’s history," R.V. Sharma, the director of the meteorological department in Bombay, said.

India’s previous heaviest rainfall, recorded at Cherrapunji in the northeastern Meghalaya state, was 83.82cm (33in) and fell on July 12, 1910, Mr Sharma said. London receives about 28in of rain per year.

Today, as the rains relented but continued to fall, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, the state of which Bombay is the capital, ordered a two-day holiday to speed the rescue effort and asked the army, navy and home guard to speed up the relief effort in the surrounding countryside.

"The situation is so grave (that despite) these human efforts, we are not in a position to reach out to the people who are in the districts," Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh told Indian television.

In Delhi, the Home Minister, Shivraj Patil, told Parliament that 633 people have been killed by monsoon floods across India in the last two months. Mr Patil told MPs that about 5.6 million people in 16,000 villages have been hit by recent heavy rains that have washed away tens of thousands of homes, roads, railway lines and bridges.

More than 76,000 farm are thought to have perished and over 700,000 hectares (1.72 million acres) of crops had been destroyed by the waters, Mr Patil said.

In Bombay, roads reopened this afternoon as yesterday's floods receded. Thousands of stranded people, including hundreds of children who were stayed in their schools as the rains fell, headed back their homes as reports of landslides in rural areas outside Bombay came to light.

State police reported landslides in Maharashtra’s Raigad, Ratnagiri, Sindhudurg, and Kolhapur areas while Krishna Vatsa, the state relief secretary, said that flooded roads were impeding rescue efforts.

More than a hundred people are feared to have died in two reported landslides. Rescuers arrived in Kandivali village, 150 km (93 miles) south of Bombay, last night hoping to save nearly 100 people trapped there, according police officer S. Jadav.

Meanwhile, another team of emergency workers reached the village of Jaigaon, also 150 km (93 miles) south of Bombay, and began searching for survivors after a rush of mud destroyed more than 30 houses late on Tuesday.

According to Reuters, officials estimate that 150 people may have been caught in the landslide. "It is very likely that a large number of people would have died in that landslide," Mr Vatsa said. "But we are hoping to find survivors."

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