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The death toll could rise as rescue efforts are under way on Monday and the vessel is pulled from muddy waters.

Overcrowding caused the double-decker boat to capsize, Abdul Nazar, junior superintendent of police of Malappuram district, told Reuters.

The boat was reportedly carrying about 50 people, or double its capacity, when it overturned on Sunday night.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed condolences on Twitter, saying he was “pained by the loss of lives”.

Many passengers were trapped under the boat and the darkness held back rescue efforts, according to local media. The casualties included women and children on school holiday.

At least four people who were taken to hospital are in critical condition, said Kerala’s sports and fisheries minister, V Abdurahiman.

Many of the passengers were not wearing life jackets at the time of the incident, survivors told local media.

The exact number of missing passengers was not immediately clear.

Authorities are investigating the cause of the mishap.

The ceremony, which saw the King and Queen Camilla crowned, was broadcast simultaneously across a range of channels between 11:00 and 13:00 BST.

Viewing peaked at 20.4 million as the King was crowned just after midday, audience measurement group Barb said.

The figures are smaller than when an average of 26.5 million viewers tuned in for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.

An average of 18.8 million people tuned into watch the Coronation across 11 channels and services, including BBC One, Two, ITV and Sky News.

On BBC One, a peak of 13.4 million viewers tuned in to the broadcast led by Huw Edwards and the channel had an average audience of 11.9 million.

ITV said an average of 3.3 million viewers watched the ceremony on ITV1 between 10:45 and 13:00.

Sky News had an average of 568,000 viewers during its broadcast of the Coronation service, while GB News had an average of 176,000 and Talk TV had an average of 14,000 viewers.

Channel 4 opted to show film Johnny English Strikes Again instead of the Coronation with an average of 138,000 people preferring to the watch Rowan Atkinson film. Meanwhile, on Channel 5 children were entertained with The Adventures of Paddington Bear and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Millions of people are thought to have watched the Queen’s coronation on television in 1953 – but there are no reliable figures, making it difficult to measure against this year’s ceremony. Based on surveys carried out by the BBC at the time, it is estimated that more than 20 million adults in the UK watched it.

The funeral service for the King’s ex-wife Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 was seen by 31 million on BBC and ITV – making it the highest TV audience on record.

A joint US-Saudi statement welcomed the start of “pre-negotiation talks” in Jeddah between the Sudanese army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). On Friday reports spoke of continuing clashes in Khartoum.

The Sudanese army says the talks aim to address humanitarian issues.

There has been no official RSF comment.

The army confirmed it had sent envoys to Jeddah to engage in the talks, which the UN and aid agencies have been pressing for, faced with a dire humanitarian crisis in Sudan.

Nearly three weeks of heavy fighting have killed hundreds of people and displaced nearly 450,000 civilians. Of that total, the International Organization for Migration says, more than 115,000 have sought refuge in neighbouring countries.

Sudan’s army commander Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan – the de facto Sudanese president – is engaged in a bitter power struggle with RSF leader Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti.

The statement from the US and Saudi governments said they “urge both parties to take in consideration the interests of the Sudanese nation and its people and actively engage in the talks towards a ceasefire and end to the conflict, which will spare the Sudanese people’s suffering and ensure the availability of humanitarian aid to affected areas”.

The joint statement also expressed hope for “an expanded negotiation process that should include engagement with all Sudanese parties”.

A Unicef spokesman, James Elder, said the conflict’s first 11 days alone had killed an estimated 190 children and wounded 1,700 – and those figures were just from health facilities in Khartoum and Darfur.

“The reality is likely to be much worse,” he said.

The intensity of the fighting has prevented much-needed aid deliveries getting through.

So far Gen Burhan and Hemedti, who led an Arab militia in the brutal Darfur conflict, have shown little readiness to reach a peace settlement.

The Tories have lost 48 councils and more than 1,000 councillors, exceeding their worst predictions.

Many Conservatives were furious at the scale of the losses, with some blaming Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Labour says it is now the largest party in local government, surpassing the Tories for the first time since 2002.

“The British public has sent a clear rejection of a prime minister who never had a mandate to begin with,” a Labour spokesperson said.

The elections of 230 councils in England were the first big test of Mr Sunak’s electoral popularity since he won the Tory leadership contest and became prime minister last October.

The Liberal Democrats had what their leader Sir Ed Davey said was their “best result in decades”, taking control of 12 councils, mostly in Tory heartlands.

The Green Party gained 241 seats – their best-ever result in local elections – and gained its first majority on an English council, in Mid-Suffolk, although they were overtaken as the biggest party by Labour in Brighton and Hove.

Mr Sunak admitted the results were “disappointing”, but said he did not detect “a massive groundswell of movement towards the Labour Party”.

Sir Keir claimed the “fantastic” results showed his party was well placed to oust the Tories from government in a general election, expected next year.

“Make no mistake, we are on course for a Labour majority at the next general election,” he told cheering activists in Medway in Kent, one of the councils his party has wrested from the Tories.

Labour won control of councils in areas that will be crucial battlegrounds in the general election, including Medway, Swindon, Plymouth, Stoke-on-Trent, and East Staffordshire.

The BBC’s projected national vote share put Labour on 35%, the Tories on 26% and the Lib Dems on 20%.

Labour’s projected nine-point lead represents its largest over the Conservatives on this measure since the party lost power in 2010.

Sir John Curtice, the polling expert, said this year’s results were “only a little short of calamitous for the Conservatives”.

But the BBC’s political editor, Chris Mason, said the results suggested it would be hard for either the Conservatives or Labour to be confident of winning a majority at the next general election.

He said there appears to be no appetite to move against Mr Sunak, after the Tories forced two prime ministers – Boris Johnson then Liz Truss – out of office last year.

Still, some Conservatives are reeling from the results, with ousted councillors and critics of Mr Sunak venting their anger at the prime minister.

As the big picture became clearer, there was disagreement among Tories over who was to blame for the loss of so many councillors.

The elections came amid a dire economic backdrop in the UK, with high inflation contributing to the worst cost-of-living crisis in decades.

A figure loyal to Mr Johnson and Ms Truss told the BBC that Mr Sunak had “no option but to own these results”.

In a seething statement, the person said: “He has been chancellor or prime minister for virtually all of the last three years and it was he and his supporters who forced Boris and then Liz out of office in order to install him in Downing Street.

“The old saying goes that ‘it is the economy, stupid’ that defines the choice voters have at the ballot box.”

In Swindon, where Labour took control of the borough council for the first time in 20 years, ousted Tory council leader David Renard blamed “the cost of living and the performance of the government in the last 12 months” for his party’s woes locally.

Mr Renard said although the prime minister had “started to stabilise things”, for voters in Swindon, “what had gone on before that was something that they didn’t like”.

The Conservative mayor of the Tees Valley, Ben Houchen, said the poor Tory performance was a partly a result of “the turmoil and upheaval of the last 12 months”.

He said Labour had been “successful in making this a referendum on the government”, adding “people don’t feel like they can vote for us”.

Nigel Churchill, a former Tory councillor who lost his seat on Plymouth Council – another Labour target – said “I think we can safely say” the Conservatives will lose the next general election.

“The general public do not trust them at the moment,” he said.

But Education Minister Robert Halfon said this year’s local elections were always “going to be difficult” for his party.

He said internal party divisions “didn’t help”, but claimed the losses were down to external factors, such as the cost-of-living crisis and problems in the NHS.

“Every government during the mid-term, especially a government that has been in power for 13 years, always suffers losses in local elections,” he said.

Other Tory MPs told the BBC that apathy – Conservative voters staying at home – was also a big problem for the party.

The Conservatives attempted to manage expectations before Thursday’s elections, with party chairman Greg Hands suggesting they could lose 1,000 council seats.

In contrast, Labour sought to downplay its chances of success, predicting gains of about 400 seats.

Most of the seats were last up for election in 2019, at a time when the UK was gripped by political turmoil over Brexit.

The seats up for grabs were mostly on district councils, responsible for services including bin collections, parks, public housing and planning applications.

The rest of the elections were for a mixture of metropolitan and unitary councils – single local authorities that deal with all local services – and for four mayors.

The elections were the first in England to see voter ID checks at polling stations. Some voters told the BBC they were turned away from polling stations, prompting critics to call for the ID rules to be dropped.