Himalayan flash flooding: how migrant workers are bearing the brunt of climate change impacts

With intense rains, cloudbursts and landslides wreaking havoc in India in recent weeks, particularly in the Himalayan region, migrant workers are once again among the sections of the population facing the gravest impacts from escalating climate risks. Employed as labourers in hydropower projects, road construction work, tourism and small industries, migrants often live and work in fragile areas of terrain with little protection from the impact of severe weather conditions.

Their settlements, typically temporary or makeshift tents, huts and wooden shacks, are often the first to be swept away in flash floods, while their jobs disappear overnight when projects halt or under construction hotels lay buried under 40–60 feet of sludge consisting of filthy water, mud and debris from intense rainfall, overflowing rivers and landslides.

On 5 August, a sudden spell of intense rainfall, known as a 'cloudburst', near the Kheer Ganga river triggered a catastrophic flash flood that tore through the picturesque village of Dharali in the Uttarkashi district of the hill state of Uttarakhand. Within minutes, the river swelled with water, mud and debris, sweeping away homes, shops, infrastructure and lives.

“The tragedy at Dharali is a stark reminder of the Himalaya’s fragile equilibrium,” said Krishna Kumar, a former national project manager, at the SECURE Himalaya Project, an initiative aimed at conserving high-altitude Himalayan ecosystems and wildlife, and improving the livelihoods of local communities in the Himalayan areas of India, jointly run by India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and the United Nations Development Programme.

“Uttarkashi sits in a seismically active, ecologically delicate zone where steep slopes, young geology and fast-flowing rivers already heighten vulnerability,” explained Kumar. “Climate change is amplifying these risks, accelerating glacial retreat, intensifying cloudbursts and destabilising fragile slopes. Local ecosystems that once buffered extreme weather are under stress from deforestation and development, compounding exposure.”

According to Kumar, recent and previous environmental disasters in the Himalayan region were not simply ‘natural’ climatic events. Instead, they reflect the compounded effects of geological fragility, environmental degradation and climatic extremes pressing down on already vulnerable mountain communities.

‘Catastrophic failure of systems’
“The Dharali disaster was not a ‘cloudburst’ but a catastrophic failure of systems,” he argues. “It was the predictable outcome of pursuing a concrete-heavy development model onto a dynamic, fragile geology, dangerously amplified by climate change. We ignored the landscape’s memory, written in its ancient debris paths, and dismissed scientific warnings as inconvenient truths.”

He warned: “True Himalayan resilience will not be built with retaining walls, but with a fundamental shift to science-based land use, empowered local communities and sustainable livelihoods that
work with the local environment, not against it. We must adapt, or we will perish.

“Perhaps, Dharali will be remembered as Daraali (meaning scary, unsettling), a metaphor for the deepening crisis in our fragile Himalayas.”

Residents of Mukhba, the village adjacent to Dharali, who witnessed the disaster, told The Hindu newspaper the number of missing and dead is likely to be higher than the figure quoted by the district administration, because a number of labourers were working in the areas where the flash floods and landslides occurred, and there is unlikely to be official records of their presence.

The newspaper reported that labourers from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Nepal were working at under-construction hotels and in apple orchards in the affected locations. “Around 50 labourers were employed at various apple orchards and an equal number of workers were at multiple construction sites,” Kali Devi, a resident of Nepal, told the newspaper. “There were tourists and pilgrims in hotels. The claim of administration that only 15–20 people are missing is false.”

‘Many workers missing’
According to official figures from the local administration, as many as 21 migrant workers from Nepal are missing, with many believed to have been trapped, killed and swept away as buildings collapsed and boulders fell as huge volumes of muddy water, mud and debris suddenly slid down the nearby hillsides after the Kheer Ganga river burst its banks following weeks of heavy rainfall and the intense ‘cloudburst’ rainfall event on 5 August.

The devastation also extended beyond Dharali into other nearby villages in Uttarakhand. On
6 August, just a day after the flash floods hit Dharali, five more Nepali migrant workers were reported missing after a flash flood hit Bankura village in Pauri Garhwal district. Several other injured workers were rescued, according to news reports.

Thousands of Nepalis work in Uttarakhand’s towns and villages close to the Nepal border. They take any available labouring jobs, from toiling on dusty road construction projects to tending crops in the fields. Lured by seasonal wages, many live in makeshift hillside settlements that are highly vulnerable in the event of landslides and flash floods. For workers toiling on construction projects, the very sites that provide them with their livelihood often become danger zones, as they are often the first to be devastated by flash floods and landslides, due to their location on hillsides or at the bottom of hilly areas.

Although disasters like the flash flood in Dharali and the landslide in Pauri Garhwal are not uncommon events in the hilly districts of Uttarakhand, the fact the Nepali migrant workers often lack formal work permits or insurance means both the workers and their families who have migrated to the region for work have little formal recourse when tragedy strikes.

Nepal has since initiated diplomatic efforts urging India to search for the missing Nepali workers.

However, the risks to migrant workers from extreme weather events in India are not confined to Uttarakhand state. In early August, in Jammu and Kashmir’s Rajouri district, a migrant worker from Uttar Pradesh was swept away by a sudden surge of water in the Dhangri stream while attempting to cross the waterway with two co-workers. Although his co-workers managed to escape, the man was lost to the water’s strong current.

Throughout August, heavy rains across the state of Jammu and Kashmir also continued to trigger floods and landslides, claiming at least 11 lives in Ramban and Reasi districts, and pushing the territory’s death toll due to the impact of severe weather events, like monsoon rain, to 122.

Multiple flood disasters
“Himalayan states have faced multiple flood disasters in the ongoing Southwest Monsoon of 2025,” noted Himanshu Thakkar, from the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) in a blog entitled 2025 Western Himalayan Floods: What can be done to reduce disastrous impacts?

“The Himalayan landscape is known to be vulnerable to landslides, mud slips, cloudbursts, flash floods, glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), erosion, seismicity and floods,” he wrote. “While some flooding is inevitable in the kind of climate prevailing here, how they become disasters is directly linked to the way we have treated the landscape, environment, regulations, people and floods.”

Thakkar emphasised that to prevent devastating downstream flooding such as the events in Dharali, it is essential the Union and State governments ensure adequate river carrying capacity is maintained; recent encroachments on rivers and streams that affect their ability to carry water, such as high levels of rainfall, are removed; and mud, soil and waste excavated and created during the construction of infrastructure like hydropower plants, dams, roads, bridges and housing, and during mining, are disposed in a systematic way so the material does not enter rivers and reduce their water-carrying capacity.

Released water from dams
He added that in India’s Himalayan states, large numbers of hydropower plants had been constructed alongside dams to hold back and then release water to power the plants’ turbines.

However, he said that poor management of the risks posed by releasing water from the dams at certain times by the operators of the hydroelectric plants was increasing the risk of devastating flooding in downstream areas. Thakkar argued that on occasions, the released water from the dams threatened to overwhelm the carrying capacity of the downstream rivers and the hydroelectric plant operators were failing to consider factors such as the existing water levels in downstream river catchments, and the effect of heavy rain on raising the water levels, before releasing water from upstream dams to generate electricity.

“Functioning early [flood] warning systems must be in place, not only in glacier areas in catchments of dams and hydro projects, but also in all landslide or flash flood prone stream catchments,” he wrote.

“Accountability mechanisms must be in place and kick in whenever any of the dam and hydro project operating procedures are not followed.”

Thakkar also criticised India’s flood forecasting systems for failing to warn residents and workers in the Himalayan states of the likelihood of heavy rainfall and impending floods.

“The Central Water Commission, our national flood forecaster, has gloriously failed for decades to predict most major floods. Even the India Meteorological Department (IMD), has failed to provide actionable, location and time-specific rainfall forecast before most disasters,” he wrote. “We hear of ‘cloudbursts’ regularly, yet IMD refuses to certify most as such, simply because its rain-gauge density is so poor.”

He added: “On disaster management, we continue to do better in rescue and relief, but we are miserable failures in prevention, on which front so much can be done.

“A good example is the GLOF management guidelines brought out by the National Disaster Management Authority in Oct 2020. The guidelines have so much to suggest in terms of preventing the disasters or reducing its impact, but none of the key recommendations are implemented almost five years since the guidelines came out. There is no action plan in place to ensure their time bound implementation.”

‘Time to learn lessons’
Thakkar added: “We also need to learn lessons from each disaster we face. The Government must institute an independent assessment of each disaster to understand what happened, who played what role, what lessons can be learnt and whom to hold accountable. Without this basic step, we cannot even start understanding the impacts and implications of these disasters, nor learn lessons for future.

“In many cases while dealing with these disasters, we are happy to use phrases like climate change, unprecedented and cloudbursts to convey as if we could not have done anything about such events. In reality, we know this is exactly what is likely to happen in the Himalayas in a changing climate.

“The factors described above are acting as force multipliers. The choices we make today is going to decide how the situation will pan out in future.”

Instability of glaciers
The risks from flash flooding, extreme rainfall and the resulting mud and landslides are compounded by the instability of glaciers in the Himalayan region, warn experts. On 28 February, a devastating glacier avalanche struck a Border Roads Organisation (BRO) road building site at Mana village in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district, burying 54 workers inside eight containers and a shed under hundreds of tonnes of snow. Although 46 workers were eventually rescued, eight lost their lives in the incident.

According to climate and weather scientists, the late arrival of rain and snow due to the warming climate was a major contributing factor to the disaster.

SP Sati, head of the environment department at the VCSG Uttarakhand University of Horticulture and Forestry in Pauri, told the Indian climate change and sustainability news service Down to Earth that in the past, snowfall in the High and Middle Himalayas typically occurred in December and January, when the ground remained cold enough for fresh snow to firmly grip the surface.

Now however, snowfall has shifted to February and March, when the ground is comparatively warmer and the density of fresh snow is lower. As a result, the freshly fallen snow is unable to hold on to the ground, and when heavier snowfall follows, the loosely held layers slip away, triggering avalanches.

According to data from Uttarakhan’s State Emergency Operation Centre (SEOC), Uttarakhand has witnessed at least a 30 per cent rise in disaster-related casualties this year, making 2025 the deadliest in recent years. So far, 239 people have been affected – 61 confirmed dead, 84 missing and 94 injured. Nearly half of Dharali was buried under the fast-flowing mudslide of slush, rubble and water.

Death toll in Uttarakhan
This year’s death toll in Uttarakhan due to weather-related events has already exceeded the 110 casualties recorded in 2024 and the nearly 100 lives lost in weather-related incidents in 2023. The figures for 2025 are approaching the devastating numbers witnessed in 2021, when a massive avalanche, triggered by a break-off from a glacier near Nanda Devi, swelled the Rishiganga and Dhauliganga rivers.

The resulting floodwaters tore through the narrow mountain valleys, washing away everything in their path, including two major hydropower projects – Rishiganga and Tapovan Vishnugad. The disaster claimed almost 200 lives, most of whom were workers at the hydropower sites. It was the deadliest disaster in Uttarakhand state and the surrounding region since a cloudburst caused devastating floods and landslides in Kedarnath in June 2013, claiming the lives of more than 6,000 people.

Experts say that in Kedarnath, years of unrestricted construction, rampant deforestation and the lack of reliable early warning systems set the stage for the flood and landslide disaster of 2013.

The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) analysis indicated that the Kedarnath disaster was caused by a combination of heavy rainfall, glacial lake outburst floods and landslides, all made worse by unplanned infrastructure development.

“When floods struck in 2021, the dangers of building hydropower projects in a landscape fragile with glacial shifts, landslides and other climate-driven upheavals was laid bare. The devastation underscored not only the human cost of ignoring ecological limits but also the urgent need for glacier monitoring, resilient infrastructure and disaster-aware planning in the Himalayas,” said an environmentalist.