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07-08-2025
Bureau Report + Agencies
NEW DELHI/ DHANALI, UTTARAKHAND: Dozens of people are feared trapped after a cloudburst triggered flash floods in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.
Videos from the site of the accident show a giant stream of water gushing through the area and engulfing Dhanali, a small riverside village.
Officials are yet to confirm any casualties but have said there has been widespread damage to property. Uttarakhand’s chief minister has said that rescue and relief operations are under way “on a war footing.”
A cloudburst is an extreme, sudden downpour of rain over a small area in a short period of time, often leading to flash floods.
Flash floods swept away homes and shops in northern India, killing at least four people and leaving many others trapped under debris, officials said on Tuesday.
Local television channels showed floodwaters surging down a mountain and crashing into Dharali, a Himalayan mountain village in the Uttarkashi district of Uttarakhand state.
The floodwaters inundated homes, swept away roads and destroyed a local market.
“About a dozen hotels have been washed away and several shops have collapsed,” said Prashant Arya, an administrative officer, adding that rescuers, including the Indian army and police, were searching for the missing.
Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said rescue agencies were working “on a war footing”.
“We are doing everything possible to save lives and provide relief,” he said in a statement.
India’s National Disaster Management Authority said it had requested three helicopters from the federal government to assist in the rescue and relief operations as rescuers struggled to access the remote terrain.
Officials have not provided a figure for those trapped or missing.
India’s weather agency has forecast more heavy rains in the region in the coming days. Authorities have asked schools to remain closed in several districts, including Dehradun and Haridwar cities.
Sudden intense downpours over small areas known as cloudbursts are increasingly common in Uttarakhand, a Himalayan region prone to flash floods and landslides during the monsoon season. Cloudbursts have the potential to wreak havoc by causing intense flooding and landslides, affecting thousands of people in the mountainous regions.
More than 6,000 people died and 4,500 villages were affected when a similar cloudburst devastated Uttarakhand state in 2013.
Experts say cloudbursts have increased in recent years partly because of climate change, while damage from the storms also has increased because of unplanned development in mountain regions.
The flooding in northern India is the latest in a series of disasters that have battered the Himalayan Mountains, which span across five countries, in the last few months.
Flooding and landslides as a result of heavy rains and glaciers melting thanks to high temperatures have killed more than 300 people in Pakistan, reported the country’s disaster agency.
In 2024 alone, there were 167 disasters in Asia including storms, floods, heat waves and earthquakes which was the most of any continent, according to the Emergency Events Database maintained by the University of Louvain, Belgium. These led to losses of over 32 billion dollars (£24 billion), the researchers found.
