Srinagar: Around 3.30 pm on 21 July, 22-year-old Aadil Qayoom Wani had just returned to his hosiery and garments shop in Beerwah, Budgam district, after buying fresh stock worth ₹1.5 lakh. He had barely settled down with a cup of tea when people began shouting that water was rushing down the Sukhnag stream.
Within minutes the stream became a roaring torrent. “There was not enough time to remove anything from the shop. We barely managed to save our lives,” Wani recalled.
The two-storey shopping complex worth crores of rupees, which his family built in 2011 along the Sukhnag embankment, had survived the 2014 floods undamaged. This time the water undercut its foundation and the structure collapsed into the torrent. Merchandise worth ₹8.5 lakh was crushed under concrete slabs or swept away.
Hours later, sifting through the debris, Wani found only twisted steel and broken concrete where his family’s livelihood once stood.
“None of us imagined it could happen so quickly,” he said.
What is unfolding across Jammu and Kashmir is no longer a rare mountain calamity confined to remote valleys. Cloudbursts and intense short-duration rainfall events have become more frequent, more destructive and more widespread, striking both rural catchments and urban centres at the height of the tourist and pilgrimage season.
While the Himalayan region has spent several consecutive years grappling with rainfall deficits, shrinking rivers and dry winters, those dry years are punctuated by short, violent bursts of rain that unleash flash floods and landslides within hours.
The India Meteorological Department’s Srinagar centre recorded around 25 cloudburst or cloudburst-like incidents in July this year. (The IMD defines a cloudburst as over 100 mm of rainfall within one hour over a highly localised 20–30 sq.km. area.)
About 13 km away in Khag, the same Sukhnag stream claimed the life of Shabir Ahmad Poswal as he tried to cross the flooded stream. He was one of at least 28 people killed in the first three weeks of July as repeated cloudbursts, flash floods and landslides battered the Union Territory. Roads, bridges, homes, power lines and water networks were damaged across multiple districts.
Further south, in Pahalgam, torrents tore through the Overa stream in early July. Hotels and tourist huts were inundated, and roads and power infrastructure were damaged, leaving 11 villages cut off. At the peak of the tourist season and the Amarnath yatra, around 20 hotels suffered heavy damage and a 100-metre stretch of road simply vanished.
In Srinagar, barely two hours of rain paralysed the summer capital. Residents waded through knee-deep water. Shops reported crore-scale losses after the drainage network buckled.
Even roads built under the ₹3,600-crore Smart City project turned into stagnant pools. The Srinagar municipal commissioner acknowledged that the rainfall had exceeded the system’s design capacity.
The frequency of extreme events is rising but the country still lacks a comprehensive long-term cloudburst database. Improved monitoring, satellite observations and media coverage have made more incidents visible than in the past, yet the evidence points to a genuine upward trend rather than merely better reporting.
A 2024 study conducted by IMD scientists documented 2,863 extreme weather events across J&K between 2010 and 2022, including 168 flash floods linked to cloudbursts and heavy downpours. These events, along with lightning and heavy snowfall, accounted for most of the 552 weather-related deaths recorded in that period.
Similarly, a 2025 Geological Survey of India study catalogued 68 cloudburst and heavy-downpour events between 2011 and 2022 and found annual incidents rising steadily, peaking at 28 in 2022.
Scientists have long regarded cloudbursts as rare but natural features of Himalayan weather. Yet across J&K, extreme rainfall is becoming more frequent, more intense than before.
The region has swung between prolonged dryness and a sudden deluge. Per data compiled by Kashmir’s independent weather analyst Faizan Arif, 2024 was J&K’s driest year in nearly five decades—870.9 mm against a normal 1,232.3 mm, a 29% deficit and the fifth straight below-normal year.
Arif noted that such dry spells leave the ground hard and unyielding. “Dry soil absorbs less water, degraded wetlands lose their capacity to store floodwater and drainage systems are more easily overwhelmed when intense rain finally arrives,” he told Mint.
Scientists describe this pattern as climate whiplash: long dry periods followed by extreme rainfall that the land can no longer handle.
Last year ranked among the Union Territory’s deadliest for weather disasters. Monsoon rains, cloudbursts, flash floods and landslides claimed 199 lives and destroyed nearly 8,000 houses, according to the ministry of home affairs.
“When I was young, cloudbursts used to happen once or twice a year in remote hilly areas, but now there are reports of cloudbursts every month,” Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said at a press briefing, calling for climate-resilient infrastructure, better flood management and scientific planning.
Mint contacted Javed Ahmad Rana, J&K minister for Jal Shakti, Forest, Ecology and Environment, seeking his response. Repeated calls to the minister remained unanswered.
Fuelling storms
Climate change is changing the conditions that produce these storms. The western Himalayas have warmed roughly twice as fast as the rest of the subcontinent since 2000.
“For every 1 degree C rise in temperature, the atmosphere can hold about 7% more moisture,” explained Mukhtar Ahmad, director of the IMD’s Srinagar centre. “That additional moisture provides more fuel for storms, allowing them to produce heavier rainfall over shorter periods.”
Rising Arabian Sea surface temperatures strengthen the flow of moisture into northwestern India. The Tibetan Plateau has also warmed rapidly, changing upper-atmospheric circulation, while the Subtropical Westerly Jet now retreats later in the season.
Together these shifts increase the overlap between Western Disturbances and the southwest monsoon, creating prolonged periods of moisture convergence that favour high-intensity rainfall over small areas, say experts.
The Himalayas further amplify the process through orographic lifting. Moisture-laden air from the Arabian Sea encounters the mountain ranges and is forced upward. As the air rises it cools rapidly, condenses into towering storm clouds and can release enormous quantities of rain over a highly localised zone.
Mohammad Muslim, assistant professor of environmental science at the University of Kashmir, noted that a similar interaction of monsoon moisture and Western Disturbances contributed to the devastating 2014 floods and is likely playing a role this year. “We are now working with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, on how climate and land-use change are reshaping regional weather,” he told Mint.
Even a strengthening El Nino, which is expected to suppress the overall Indian monsoon, does not prevent these extremes. These intense episodes are becoming destructive even in years when the seasonal total remains below normal.
El Nino typically weakens the large-scale monsoon circulation by changing atmospheric patterns over the equatorial Pacific, often resulting in below-normal seasonal rainfall across the country.
“A season can end with an overall rainfall deficit yet still experience a few episodes of extremely heavy rainfall that trigger flash floods and landslides. Rainfall distribution is just as important as the seasonal total,” Arif explained.
This year the monsoon began with a significant deficit across much of India, but later intensified over several regions, producing heavy to very heavy rainfall and flooding. The occurrence of floods during an El Nino year highlights how rainfall can still be concentrated into short, intense episodes.
Changing terrain
The Himalayas are considered vulnerable because of their steep terrain, fragile geology, rapidly flowing rivers and expanding human settlements and infrastructure.
Ground-level changes have also stripped away the natural buffers that once moderated such storms. For generations, Kashmir’s forests slowed runoff, its wetlands (often described as the kidneys of the earth) stored excess water, and its floodplains gave rivers room to spread. Much of that protection has disappeared.
For example, a University of Kashmir study found nearly 20 wetlands around Srinagar have vanished over five decades, while the wetland area in the Jhelum basin had shrunk from 288.96 sq km in 1972 to 266.45 sq. km by 2018.
Many colonies inundated during the 2014 floods had never flooded before, researchers found, because the wetlands that once absorbed surplus water had been reclaimed or degraded. The Comptroller and Auditor General has documented the loss of hundreds of lakes since 1967, erasing nearly 2,900 hectares of flood storage.
Global Forest Watch data show the region lost roughly 4,090 hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2022. “Deforestation or construction do not cause cloudbursts,” said Shakil Ahmad Romshoo, a leading Kashmir earth scientist, “but they increase the severity of flash floods, landslides and debris flows that follow.”
Healthy catchments with intact vegetation can moderate runoff to some extent. Degraded catchments convert a much larger proportion of intense rainfall into rapid surface flow. Urbanized areas can generate 20-60% more runoff than natural landscapes during the same rainfall event.
Where people raise structures also matters as much as how much it rains. “When the water level in the rivers declined during dry years, people started encroaching on their banks and constructing houses,” said Showkat Ali, a government teacher in Poonch. People who encroached on the banks of the Suran River in Poonch during drier years paid a heavy price when the water returned with force.
This July, a single cloudburst sent mud, rocks and floodwater through a residential house beside a stream in the Loran area of Poonch, killing eight members of one family. These tragedies are the predictable consequence of placing people and property in the path of rivers that still remember their natural courses.
The economic toll stretches far beyond the immediate loss of life and property. Tourism is usually the first sector hit. July’s floods in Pahalgam damaged hotels, washed away roads, disrupted power and cut off villages at the height of the season and the Amarnath Yatra.
- 25 | The number of cloudbursts or cloudburst-like incidents recorded by IMD Srinagar just in July.
- 2,863 | Extreme weather events recorded across Jammu & Kashmir between 2010 and 2022.
- 29% | Rainfall deficit in Jammu & Kashmir in 2024—the region’s driest year in nearly five decades.
Every day of disruption costs hotels, transport operators, guides, pony owners, restaurants and the many small businesses that depend on visitors. Agriculture, which supports nearly 70% of the population, faces a different kind of damage. Intense rainfall washes away topsoil, damages orchards, destroys irrigation channels and trout farms, and triggers landslides that permanently change slopes.
The sector also depends on a single highway that is routinely blocked by landslides, delaying the arrival of produce in markets. Last year’s monsoon floods alone caused agricultural losses estimated at ₹209 crore.
Hydropower infrastructure is equally vulnerable. An intense downpour in early July sent mud, boulders and debris crashing into the under-construction 540 MW Kwar project site in Kishtwar.
The 2014 floods, which killed more than 100 people and caused losses estimated at ₹1 trillion, remains a crystal clear reminder of how extreme rainfall can cripple an entire economy.
According to climate activists, stricter land-use zoning is essential to keep construction off flood plains and unstable slopes. Early-warning systems must reach villages in real time rather than stopping at district headquarters. Engineered protection works need to be paired with the restoration of forests, wetlands and catchments so that the landscape can once again absorb and channel intense rainfall.
“We need a sustainable tourism policy on priority,” said Kashmir-based climate activist Raja Muzaffar Bhat. “There should be limits on the number of tourists and pilgrims visiting high-altitude areas, and governments must avoid further infrastructure development in fragile mountain regions.”
Whether the authorities will take such difficult decisions in the interest of the greater good is anybody's guess.