Dr. Arvind Kumar*
It’s no longer a meteorological aberration; it is indeed a climate crisis in real time, deserving immediate attention, scientific foresight, and political will, lest resilience give way to loss, beyond repair.
As the rivers swell during monsoons, they present an opportunity for flash floods and cloudbursts, which have been considered freakish events even by Indian standards, but are fast becoming a real threat to vulnerable mountain ecosystems and urban floodplains. Places like Uttarkashi, Himachal, and Assam are witnessing patterns of rainfall long considered archaic and are suddenly inundating rivers, destabilizing slopes, and uprooting lives and livelihoods. Such manifestations are not stand-alone incidents but are indicative of a larger and accelerating trend. It’s no longer a meteorological aberration; it is indeed a climate crisis in real time, deserving immediate attention, scientific foresight, and political will, lest resilience give way to loss, beyond repair.
The global empirical evidence shows that many disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM) interventions and policies have been plagued with top-down approaches and highly technocratic and exclusive measures that, instead of delivering just outcomes, have only marginalized some segments of the population, especially the vulnerable. Despite their developmental objectives, DRRM policies and interventions have unintended impacts and consequences that we should vigilantly review and learn from.
In recent years, the frequency of cloudbursts has risen significantly, driven by a combination of factors. Climate change is amplifying atmospheric instability, allowing air to hold more moisture and release it in sudden, concentrated bursts. Rising global and regional temperatures are intensifying the monsoon’s energy, increasing the probability of extreme precipitation events. In the Himalayan belt, land-use changes such as deforestation, unregulated construction, and road-cutting have destabilized slopes, reduced natural water absorption and increased runoff. The warming of the Indian Ocean and associated shifts in monsoon circulation patterns have further contributed to the erratic and intense nature of rainfall in high-altitude regions. These extreme events most often occur over mountainous regions, where warm, moisture-laden monsoon air is rapidly lifted by the topography. the cloud structure collapses, releasing rainfall so intense that it can inundate terrain within minutes.
The impacts are severe. In the Himalayas, where slopes become saturated during the monsoon months, cloudbursts can unleash cascading disasters. With little to no warning, they can trigger landslides, flash floods, and debris flows that devastate infrastructure, sweep away homes, and cause significant loss of life. Steep terrain and fragile geology magnify the destructive power, transforming a meteorological event into a full-scale humanitarian crisis.
Counting the Cost: 2020–2025
Among the more recent dark phases of India’s past are a series of catastrophic tragedies brought on by cloudbursts in rapid succession and drawing the public imagination into questions of profound fault lines in mountain administration. The calamity of Kedarnath in 2013 is a reminder that time can usher many events into memory but not erase them from the lessons taught by nature’s anger and infrastructure vulnerability. More recently, in August 2025, in the Dharali village of Uttarkashi, a presumed cloudburst left its wake against homes, bridges, and lives, swallowing dozens dead and missing.
Things are equally scary elsewhere. The deluge in Germany in 2021, the record flood that engulfed Pakistan in 2022, and the flash floods in Texas in 2025 are incidents that exemplify cross-boundary hydrometeorological risk. This ghastly transformation into routine events, now one-in-a-century, stultifies all joints of emergency global cooperation and nature-based resilience measures. . Losses from cloudbursts and flash floods between the years 2020 and 2025 have been enormous, in terms of both life and property. An estimated 25,000 lives were lost around the world, while economic losses crossed $50 billion. In India, the annual losses from these phenomena amount to over 5,000 lives and ₹30,000 crore in economic losses.
Cumulatively, such disasters killed about 25,000 people and caused a scale of economic losses ranging from $50-$60 billion during this period. These figures provide evidence of enormous overdrafts brought forth by the dismal flash floods of Texas in 2025, catastrophic floods of Germany’s Ahr Valley in 2021, record monsoon floods in Pakistan in 2022, and high-altitude cloudbursts in Nepal in 2025, indicating an increase in frequency and intensity of precipitation events made worse through climate change and unpreparedness.
Among the landmark disasters in the collective memory of disasters in India was, of course, the 2013 Kedarnath disaster, though it lies outside the lower time frame in the table. Other recent ones, like the Himachal Pradesh floods, which occurred in 2023, and the suspected cloudburst in August 2025 in Dharali village of Uttarkashi, keep attesting to how vulnerable mountain settlements are at present. Millions are displaced, as always, in each monsoon season in Assam and Bihar due to flooding. This, in turn, affects the local economy.
Blueprint for India
India has been much more vulnerable to increasing cloudbursts and flash floods in the Himalayan and Western Ghats regions, and that requires urgent, systemic action now. Such extreme weather events were once outliers from the norm, but they are becoming certainties of the season. The first and most critical defense line of any country is a robust early warning system. Expanding Doppler radar coverage in mountainous terrain, bringing investment to high-resolution weather forecasting models, and integrating real-time alerts with mobile networks and local governance structures can dramatically improve the response times and save lives.
A city that needs equally reevaluating is land use and infrastructure planning. Unregulated construction on steep slopes and riverbanks exacerbates disaster risk and must be strictly curtailed. Many of the urban drainage systems found in cities are old and inadequate to handle heavy stormwater runoff; hence, they must be redesigned to accommodate high-intensity rainfall events. Poorly constructed bridges, roads, and hydropower beacons should be retrofitted to meet climate-resilient standards to withstand sudden deluging.
A third aspect of resilience is community preparedness. Public awareness campaigns, disaster education in schools, and assistance in training local response teams will go a long way toward grassroots readiness. Simultaneously, ecological restoration—which includes activities like reforestation, reviving wetlands, and protecting floodplains—provides “natural buffers” against flash floods, reducing impacts downstream.
Reforms in policy need to match realities on the ground in the context of climate. The Disaster Management Act must include basic provisions for cloudburst events, which currently remain under-addressed. Those development plans must also contain schemes for risk zoning and mapping vulnerabilities in the district. The interstate coordination mechanisms should also be institutionalised to ensure timely, collaborative action across jurisdictions in disaster response to the above mountainous disasters.
A Wake-Up Call from the Mountains
Cloudbursts and flash floods present not just tragedies in remote valleys or monsoons. These are foreboding signals of an internally deep-ecological aberration. From Uttarakhand to Himachal, the hills now groan under the burden of rampant deforestation, unplanned development, and climatic instability. The land has sent a loud message: adapt or be washed away. The choice facing India today is stark: either more of the same reflexive firefighting-rescue operations, relief parcels, and postmortem-or fully engage in the sustainable building of resilience right from the source. This would include remapping land use, restoration of degraded areas, and cutting climate risk through every level of planning and governance. These have ethical and developmental accounting attached to them, to say the least. The climate-resilience strategy will not come from isolated programs, but from coherent and multi-dimensional approaches integrating science, governance, and community wisdom. If India wants to protect its citizens and green heritage, it will have to listen to the mountains-not merely through remote sensors and satellites, but deeply, humbly, with foresight and thorough systemic commitment.
*Editor, Focus Global Reporter
