Five people were killed and about 50 missing following several incidents of cloudburst in Himachal Pradesh where rains washed away many houses, bridges and roads, officials said on Thursday.
The conditions that lead to landslides, including soil texture, soil moisture and slope are known, and it is important to put all this knowledge into an operational system, he said.
The building had a motor workshop and warehouse on the ground floor, a medical godown on the first floor and a cutlery warehouse on the second floor.
Two persons were rescued after the incident that occurred at 4.50 am in Shahbaz village, they said, adding that before the building collapsed, the authorities managed to evacuate 52 residents.
Two more bodies have been located under the debris at the site of a giant hoarding collapse in Mumbai as the search and rescue operation continued more than 40 hours after the incident, officials said on Wednesday.
The police said that it cannot be ascertained whether the girl was raped until her body is found.
They said at least four such cases are being looked into by the anti-terror agency officials.
The death toll in the devastating landslides in Kerala's Wayanad district rose to 167 on Wednesday, while 191 were missing even as the rescue teams intensified efforts to find survivors trapped under the debris on the second day of the search operations.
The National Disaster Response Force has deployed its teams in vulnerable areas of Gujarat to deal with cyclonic storm Nilofar that will hit the state's coast on Friday.
The cyclonic storm is likely to make landfall between Bhitarkanika National Park and Dhamra Port in Odisha early Friday with wind speeds of up to 120 kilometres per hour (kmph), it said.
Heavy rain continued to lash Chennai and other parts of Tamil Nadu on Wednesday, bringing residential neighborhoods and roads under knee-deep water and leading to traffic congestion besides affecting public transport services.
Swollen water bodies changed their course and flowed through inhabited areas, resulting in more destruction.
Seven bodies have been recovered in the operation that continued through the night, Sachin GIDC police station inspector Jignesh Chaudhari said.
The body of an eight-year-old boy who had fallen into a stormwater drain in Guwahati on Thursday, was recovered about 4 km downstream in Rajgarh area, police said.
A total of 1,162 essential documents have been distributed among 872 persons at the camp, the district administration in Wayanad said.
Vijayan said the news that the SDMA had directed scientific institutions and scientists not to visit the disaster-affected Meppadi panchayat in Wayanad and not to express their opinions was misleading.
Working round-the-clock to help flood victims in Bihar, National Disaster Response Force personnel rendered timely help to three marooned pregnant women at separate places deliver their babies safely.
A special control room at the forces' headquarter New Delhi is monitoring the situation 24X7.
At least five people were killed in separate rain-related incidents on Tuesday in Bengaluru, which has been reeling under incessant rains for the past three days causing widespread flooding in several residential areas and turning roads into virtual rivers.
The administration is geared up for more showers as the India meteorological department has warned of heavy to very heavy rains with isolated extremely heavy rains in several districts of the state till Thursday morning.
The teams will be in addition to the 56 such contingents which are undertaking flood combat operations in these two states, besides Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
Rescue operations in Kerala's Wayanad district resumed on Thursday, marking one of the largest efforts to save those stranded by the landslides that have hit the region.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday that violence in Manipur is continuously declining and educational institutes along with businesses have opened in most parts of the state.
Due to heavy rains and waterlogging over the tracks at several locations on South Central Railway network, as many as 99 trains were cancelled and four trains were partially cancelled while 54 trains were diverted, an SCR official said.
The cyclone is expected to intensify into a very severe cyclonic storm by Tuesday, a home ministry statement said.
In one of the worst natural disasters in Kerala, at least 123 persons were killed and 128 injured in massive landslides triggered by torrential rains in Wayanad on Tuesday. With hundreds trapped under the debris, sparking fears of mounting fatalities, rescue agencies were racing against time to pull out any survivors.
A third team to combat chemical or radiological leakage or attack incidents has also been based at the Indira Gandhi International Airport.
'It was a war-like situation, but instead of enemy fire, we fought against the vagaries of nature,' says Major Seeta Shelke.
As Cyclone Dana barrels toward the coasts of Odisha, threatening to impact nearly half of the state's population, the government is racing against time to execute a massive evacuation plan aimed at relocating about 10 lakh people in several coastal districts to safety. In West Bengal, the cyclone is set to bring heavy rainfall in several southern West Bengal districts, including Kolkata, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has said.
More than 4.5 lakh pilgrims paid their obeisance at the natural ice Shiva Lingam formation inside the cave shrine last year.
The 100-foot-tall illegal billboard fell at a petrol pump in Ghatkopar during dust storms and unseasonal rains that lashed Mumbai on Monday.
Some people broke down at the shock of seeing the cold and injured bodies of their loved ones, while others heaved a sigh of relief that their kin were not among the deceased.
More than 170 personnel have been tested till now after they returned to their base in Cuttack, Odisha, from the cyclone-affected West Bengal.
This is the first cyclone in the Bay of Bengal this pre-monsoon season.
Intermittent, widespread rains lashed Chennai and other regions of Tamil Nadu on Tuesday and the India meteorological department said the low pressure area over the Bay of Bengal has turned into a well-marked low pressure area and it is likely to become a depression.
India's National Disaster Response Force on Monday began withdrawal of its men from quake-hit Nepal after the country asked foreign rescue teams to end their work.
The situation in rain-battered Gujarat improved slightly on Thursday as the rainfall activity subsided, but Vadodara and some other parts of the state are still reeling under a flood-like situation due to overflowing rivers while the authorities continue the rescue and relief operations.
Officials said around 1,300 pilgrims are stranded in Kedarnath, Bhimbali and Gaurikund, and are safe.
The bodies of three labourers were on Saturday pulled from the rubble of a wall that collapsed at a construction site in the Vasant Vihar area in New Delhi amid heavy rain, officials said.
Some areas were under 10 to 12 feet of water, said health minister and government spokesperson Rushikesh Patel.
