"The death toll has mounted to 23," said a spokesman of the Disaster Management Department. "These deaths are mostly due to house collapses."
Moderate to heavy rains were expected to continue along the coast for the next 48 hours, the local weather department said.
As many as 120,000 people have been moved to 369 relief centres, the spokesman said, and almost 4,000 houses were completely destroyed.
The rains have also claimed another 35 lives in the southernmost state of Tamil Nadu in the past fortnight, senior official L.K. Tripathy told the Press Trust of India on Tuesday.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2006