LUCKNOW, India: Heavy rains continued to lash northern and eastern India, with another 44 people reported killed within 24 hours, as officials rushed Tuesday to rescue hundreds of thousands trapped in their homes. The latest reported deaths brought the toll of those killed by monsoon flooding to 163 over the last four days. Most of the dead were from India's most populous northern state, Uttar Pradesh. Since Monday, 32 people were killed there by drowning, house collapses and electrocution as most of the state's rivers overflowed their banks, the state relief commissioner, G.K. Tandon, said on Tuesday. Another 70 people were killed over the weekend in the state and floods forced 200,000 people to flee their homes, Tandon said. The state government set up more than 2,000 relief camps across Uttar Pradesh to house the flood survivors. In the eastern state of Orissa, the death toll over the last four days from heavy rains and flooding rose to 29 Tuesday morning, said the state's chief secretary, Ajit Kumar Tripathi. On Monday, 17 people were reported to have died. The authorities have evacuated nearly 285,000 people since Friday and put them in 261 state-run relief camps, Tripathi said in an interview. Officials were trying to reach another 200,000 stranded villagers. More rain is expected over the next few days and the state government has called in help from the Indian Navy, Tripathi said, adding that about 650 villages were inundated. Three Indian Air Force helicopters were dropping food packages to stranded villagers and 1,300 motorboats and rowboats were being used to rescue people in the worst-hit districts. Incessant monsoon precipitation caused the Mahanadi River to breach its banks in several places, causing the worst flooding in 26 years in Orissa State. Another 32 people died in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh over the weekend, most of them buried by mudslides triggered by heavy rains, news reports said. The latest floods came just a month after the monsoon-swollen Kosi River, a tributary of the Ganges that flows from Nepal to India, burst its banks and submerged nearly 1,000 villages in the impoverished northern Indian state of Bihar, killing at least 48 people and driving more than one million others from their homes. The annual monsoon season, which runs from June to September, brings rains that are vital to agriculture in South Asia but also can cause widespread destruction.