Millions of people in India face starvation after a chilling local prophecy, which predicts that a plague of rats will overrun a region of the country every half century, appears to have come true. Thousands of tribal families in the state of Mizoram on the Burmese and Bangladesh borders are struggling to feed themselves after being overrun by hundreds of millions of rats — a deadly natural phenomenon known as mautam.

The rodent population boom follows the heavy flowering of a local species of bamboo, an event that occurs every 48 years and provides the region's rats with a feast of high protein foliage. Once the animals have ravaged the bamboo, they turn on local crops. “People do not have food for tomorrow. We are afraid to plant anything because the rats consume everything, even cash crops like oranges and vegetables like pumpkins and chillies,” J.Rochunga of the Poithar village in Lawngtlai, one of the hardest hit areas of Mizoram, said.

Survivors of the previous mautam, which heralded widespread famine in 1958, say they remember areas of paddy fields the size of four football pitches being devastated by rats overnight. Villagers forced to abandon their smallholdings and scavenge in the jungle are now reliving the nightmare. “My family could starve. How long can we forage to survive? We are walking longer into the forest each day to find anything edible,” Gulsogi, a 40-year-old widow from Bolisora, another village in Lawngtlai, said.

The first heavy flowering of the bamboo brakes that cover a third of Mizoram's mountainous terrain were spotted in 2005, spreading dread through a local population brought up on tales of past hordes of rats.

Government measures such as a bounty of one rupee per rats tail — an offer that fuelled the cull of some 221,636 rodents in 2006 — have made little impact. Now, with at least 100,000 people already going hungry, aid workers say the situation will deteriorate as farmers refuse to sow next season's crop until the rats have been eradicated.

“There are clear signs of a crisis unfolding. Reports of acute food shortages in pockets adjoining borders with Burma and Bangladesh are coming in,” Mrinal Gohain of the charity ActionAid, said.

“Some villages are in a particularly bad shape, with people surviving by foraging in the forest since October last year.” Almost two thirds of villages in some areas are now in a state of “serious crisis” as inaccessible terrain and a wider shortage of food hampers aid, local officials said.

The mautam is unfolding amid wider concerns over South Asia's ability to feed itself as world prices for staple foods soar. Rice prices on the global market have spiked as much as 40 per cent since January. In Dehli's markets rice prices have risen by a fifth in the past six months, according to the Finance Ministry.

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