More than two million people in India’s north eastern state of Assam have been affected by heavy flooding, which has also killed at least 50, officials told local media.

A video of a minister wading into muddy waters to rescue people has garnered attention, highlighting the situation.

Excessive rain in the past few weeks has engulfed thousands of villages.

A heavy monsoon in the region is common, but this comes as India battles rising Covid-19 infections.

The minister, Mrinal Saikal, is seen helping two children and a woman out of their flooded home and onto a boat. “Flood is creating havoc in my constituency,” he wrote on Twitter, “We have been rescuing stranded people from interior places.”

In another video posted by him on Twitter on Sunday, he is seen saving goats.

On Tuesday, officials said that swathes of the Kaziranga National Park in the state, a Unesco World Heritage site, had been submerged and that at least 51 wild animals had died. Officials rescued 102 animals, they said, adding that some tigers and rhinos strayed into nearby villages to avoid flooding.

Kaziranga is home to two thirds of the world’s population of the one-horned rhinoceros.

Officials deployed nearly 100 boats across the state in the past few days, according to local media reports.

Authorities have also set up 480 relief camps across 20 districts, providing temporary shelter for more than 60,000.

Visuals from the state showed infrastructure such as roads, homes and buildings inundated by flood waters.

• Forgotten floods: Why India can’t afford to ignore Assam
• Monsoon floods kill dozens and displace millions in India

A heavy monsoon is a yearly occurrence in Assam, resulting in flooding and landslides which prompt residents to often flee their homes and belongings. In fact, when a controversial citizenship act last year asked residents to prove their Indian citizenship via documentation, many feared they wouldn’t be able to do so due to the rains either destroying documents or families being displaced.

Around the same time in 2019, millions were stranded or displaced as devastating floods ravaged large parts of India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

Assam and Bihar were the two Indian states that bore the brunt, with officials saying that nearly 100 people were killed.