ISLAMABAD, Aug 23 (AFP) - Around 100,000 people have been evacuated from flooded villages in Pakistan's Punjab province, emergency services said on Wednesday.

Several hundred villages and thousands of acres of cropland in the central province were inundated when the Sutlej river burst its banks on Sunday.

Emergency services have been working to evacuate residents and livestock to higher ground.

"We have rescued 100,000 people and transferred them to safer places," Farooq Ahmad, spokesman for the Punjab emergency services, told AFP.

The head of Punjab's government, Mohsin Naqvi, said that monsoon rains had prompted authorities in India to release excess reservoir water into the Sutlej river, causing flooding downstream on the Pakistani side of the border.

Officials on the Indian side could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Punjab disaster management agency warned that forecasted monsoon rains could exacerbate the flooding in the coming days.

Pakistan is still struggling to recover from the devastating floods that inundated nearly one-third of the country in 2022, affecting more than 33 million people.