(Recasts with higher toll, details)

By S. Murari

CHENNAI, India, Nov 26 (Reuters) - At least 32 people have died in floods caused by a tropical storm in southern India and thousands more have been evacuated to higher ground, officials said on Wednesday.

Heavy rains brought down mud houses, uprooted trees and damaged paddy crops in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, officials and witnesses said.

Hundreds of people from low-lying areas in the city of Chennai, the state capital and the biggest city in the region, were moved to higher grounds.

Authorities said the storm was expected to cross the Tamil Nadu coast late on Wednesday near Nagapattinam town, where more than 6,000 people died in the December 2004 tsunami.

At least 24,000 people living near the sea were evacuated and being given food and clothes in camps, Chandrasekaran, a senior government official told Reuters from Nagapattinam, 300 km (190 miles) south of Chennai.

More people were expected to be evacuated as the river Cauvery burst a dam further south and swamped farmlands and villages.

Authorities said they had reports of 32 deaths from remote districts in the state over the past week, mostly caused by electrocution as overhead electric wires snapped after the storm, Nisha, swept across the state.

The unseasonal rains also flooded more than 80,000 ha (around 200,000 acres) of cropland in the southern state, officials said.

Authorities shut schools state-wide on Wednesday, and used pumps to drain water from the streets of Chennai.

Fishermen were warned against taking their boats to sea after more than 100 vessels were damaged and an Indian fishing trawler sank in Sri Lankan waters. (Reporting by S. Murari; Writing by Bappa Majumdar; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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