Relentless monsoon rains have unleashed some of the worst flooding and landslides in decades across northern India, killing at least 90 people and displacing hundreds of thousands in recent weeks, government officials said.

The Himalayan states and territories such as Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, as well as Punjab, are among the worst affected. New Delhi and nearby regions have been hit by rising rivers and heavy rain. Thousands have been moved to safer ground as city officials said the Yamuna had breached danger levels.

Punjab crop scare

In Punjab, which is home to more than 30 million people and one of India’s key agricultural regions, farmers said crops and livestock had been destroyed.

On Thursday, the death toll in the devastating floods rose to 43 while crops on 1.71 lakh hectares have been damaged. Union agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Friday said he would submit a detailed report on the Punjab flood situation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi after visiting the flood-hit areas.

Surinder Singh, a farmer in Punjab’s Kapurthala district, said his 10 acres of farmland had been underwater since August 11 in one of the areas that has been hardest hit by flooding.

“We have lost paddy, maize, and wheat crops worth over ₹7 lakh. Children had to be moved to safer villages. The government visits, but we have received little help so far,” he said.

Earlier this week, an eight-hour traffic jam paralysed a highway between New Delhi and Gurgaon after floodwaters submerged roads. Officials said annual average rainfall levels had already been crossed and residents had moved away from the Yamuna, which runs through New Delhi.

“We have moved to these tents for now as our homes have been submerged in water. This is just like the 2023 floods,” said Rekha Chaturvedi, 55, of the Nigambodh Ghat area.

“This is the second time this month our fields have been flooded,” said Fayaz Ahmad, a 70-year-old farmer living on the outskirts of Srinagar.

Ahmad added: “We saw extreme heat this year, and now water keeps entering our homes and farms after just a few days of rain. Something has changed. It was never like this in my youth.”

Climate change

Climate change is likely a key reason for the monsoon’s unpredictability, which has led to the heavy rain in August and these conditions are expected to persist for the next few weeks, according to experts.

The South Asian region, which is among the world’s most densely populated and also among the most vulnerable to climate impacts, will need to better prepare for rain-related disasters as their frequency and intensity increase, experts said.

In Uttarakhand’s Dharali, geologist-turned-campaigner Navin Juyal’s warning that concrete embankments would not shield the town from the Kheer Ganga’s fury if upstream events roused the Bhagirathi tributary came true last month.

On August 5, persistent rain upstream triggered a deluge that unleashed torrents of water, mud and boulders into Dharali, a pilgrim stopover en route to Gangotri, flattening hotels, homes and vehicles. Although the official death toll was seven, the actual numbers are believed to be much higher.

The rains didn’t bring disaster to Dharali alone. Days later, cloudbursts hit Chamoli and Rudraprayag, also in Uttarakhand, burying homes and cowsheds. Overflowing glacial lakes in July damaged several hydropower dams and destroyed a key bridge connecting neighbouring Nepal to China.

NDRF and SDRF personnel conduct a search and rescue operation at an affected area after a cloudburst, at Pausari village in Bageshwar district, Uttarakhand, Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. PTI

Authorities have documented 36 cloudbursts, 74 flash floods and at least 70 landslides in Himachal Pradesh since the start of the 2025 summer monsoon.

Weather studies indicate that such extreme events are becoming more frequent. India recorded 473 episodes of “extreme heavy rainfall” in 2024, up from 421 in 2023, 296 in 2022, and 273 in 2021, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD).

The steep slopes and fragile high-altitude terrain of Himalayan states like Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand make them particularly susceptible to these increasingly frequent deluges.

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found two years ago that global warming is shifting snowfall to rainfall in mountains across the northern hemisphere, with each degree rise in average temperature contributing to 15 per cent more rain at high elevations.

Unplanned projects

Scientists and campaigners, including Juyal, say the havoc across Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh has been fuelled not only by extreme rain episodes but also by unrestrained road development that disregards the fragile Himalayan terrain.

For more than five years, Juyal and others have urged the Union surface transport ministry to redesign its 2016 project to widen the 889km Char Dham highway for all-weather access to Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnathand Badrinath.

“Faulty and unscientific widening of the highway has increased the risk of landslides,” said Hemant Dhyani, an environmental activist and member of a high-powered committee (HPC) set up by the Supreme Court in August 2019 to scrutinise the CharDham project.

According to Dhyani, contractors working on the widening have adopted a cut-and-dump approach that involves vertical cutting and felling trees on the mountainsides, dumping the excavated material in ways that weaken slopes and heighten vulnerability to landslides. HPC members, including Dhyani, had recommended an alternative “cut-and-fill” strategy, which involves cutting a small portion of the mountain while simultaneously filling thevalley side.

“The cut-and-fill strategy minimises tampering with the mountains and can only be done if the road width is restricted to 5.5 metres,” Dhyani said. But authorities have widened much of the Char Dham highway to 10 metres, a width the filling method cannot accommodate.

The consequences of this approach are evident in a study published earlier this year by Sowmik Saha and Biswajit Bera at Sidho-Kanho Birsha University, Purulia, which documented 811 landslides along the Char Dham highway since the widening began. Most occurred on steep slopes cut directly into the hills, with the number of landslides rising sharply between 2013 and 2023, the researchers reported in Geotechnical and Geological Engineering.

“The widening project has effectively turned long segments of the Char Dham route into chronic landslide zones,” said Mallika Bhanot, a volunteer with Ganga Avahan, a citizens’ forum in Uttarakhand campaigning forresponsible development.

Deadly cocktail

Experts say human-caused climate change is intensifying South Asia’s monsoons, which traditionally run from June to September and again from October to December. The rains, once predictable, now arrive in erratic bursts that dump extreme amounts of water in short periods, followed bydry spells.

“We are living in a warmer world, nearly 1.5 degrees hotter than pre-industrial times,” said Anjal Prakash, author of several United Nations climate reports and professor at the Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business. “The intensity and frequency of such extreme rainfall events will only increase. This is thenew normal.”

Rapid urbanisation, deforestation and poorly planned infrastructure have worsened flooding, Prakash said.

“Natural drainage systems have been destroyed. Rivers are mismanaged. When intense rainfall coincides with such vulnerabilities, disasters like these become inevitable,” Prakash said.

Akshay Deoras, a meteorologist at the University of Reading, in the UK, said rainfall extremes can occur because of local weather conditions or large-scale weather conditions, but climate change is just intensifying them.

“If the rainfall is uniformly distributed, you will not get that much of an impact,” said Deoras, who has tracked Indian weather systems for more than a decade. “But if that rainfall happens, let’s say in a couple of hours or even, for example, the entire month’s rainfall happens in a few days, that is just going to create problems. And that’s exactly what we are seeing.”

Climate experts said smart planning and rebuilding in climate-vulnerable regions must include accounting for multiple risks, installing early warning systems, preparing local communities for disasters and, when needed, relocating infrastructure.

In 2024 alone, there were 167 disasters in Asia, which was the most of any continent, according to the Emergency Events Database maintained by the University of Louvain, Belgium. The storms, floods, heat waves and earthquakes led to losses of over $32 billion, the researchers found.

Countries need to do more to plan for such events in the future, as their frequency will only increase, Deoras said.

“Right now, in India, there is no clear vision as to how things could be handled in the future,” he said.