Heavy rains in the last three days triggered flash floods in parts of Bihar, where 41 people have died so far, and inundated large areas in Assam and North Bengal, paralysing normal life and snapping rail link to the Northeast from the rest of the country.
Jammu and Kashmir was bracing for a fresh spell of rains as predicted by Met department, leading to nervousness among the people who were heaving a sigh of relief as flood situation was showing improvement on Tuesday after causing the death of 17 people.
After a comprehensive analysis is undertaken to find the reasons of this incident, "we will build an elaborate plan to avert any potential tragedy going forward", Rawat said.
Tapovan Hydro-Electric Power Dam, also known as Rishi Ganga Project was completely washed off following a glacier burst in the Chamoli district, said the Indian Air Force's initial report as Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH) deployed at Joshimath has undertaken recce of affected areas.
In northern Thailand, hundreds of international rescue workers have been spending their last waking hours for the past 11 days trying to get a group of 12 boys, ages 11 to 16, and their 25-year-old soccer coach who have been trapped in a cave after flooding caused by relentless monsoon rains. On July 2, rescue teams discovered all of the boys and their coach alive and in relatively good health, sheltering deep inside the cave complex. Outside, family and friends, who had gathered, welcomed the news. While the boys have been found, extracting them from the cave still remains a difficult task -- much of the return trip is underwater and even though pumps are lowering the water level, the rainfall is not letting up. Here's what's happening and what officials are planning to get them out.
Using drones and remote-sensing equipment, rescue teams intensified efforts on Wednesday to reach the 25-35 men trapped in a sludge-choked tunnel since the Uttarakhand glacier disaster three days ago and more than 170 remained missing, hopes of finding them alive fading with every passing hour.
Finance Minister P Chidambaram told reporters after the meeting that the situation in Uttarakhand is better than what it was on Tuesday and Food Minister K V Thomas is taking steps to rush more food grains to the flood-hit Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.
Many villages were cut off as several roads connecting them were inundated.
26 people died in Amreli, which is the worst hit district.
The Navy has has kept five flood teams and three diving teams on stand-by in Mumbai, the official said. These teams, trained and equipped for rescue operations, are stationed at various naval areas across Mumbai and can provide early response over a larger area, he said.
'You are talking as if Patna has been the only place which has suffered on account of heavy rain. What happened in Mumbai and America when these places were battered by similar downpour?'
Rescue teams on Sunday recovered 13 more bodies, including the first ones to be pulled out from the sludge-choked Tapovan tunnel where a massive operation to reach about 30 people trapped inside began after a flash flood in Chamoli district a week ago.
'Except that the population was much less.' 'I remember my uncle and family moving away from the base of a hill whenever it rained for more than a couple of days without a dry day in between.' 'Perhaps the older generations knew if it rained for more than a certain time, they must pack up to a camp or to a relative.' 'As some of the interviews of the survivors on the Malayalam television channels show, the elderly people had a premonition a tragedy would happen, and those who acted on those premonitions survived.'
As Odisha and West Bengal are bracing for a severe cyclonic storm, governments of both states started evacuating people and while deciding to close educational institutions in vulnerable areas.
A woman drowned on Sunday after a car she was travelling in with her family got stuck in neck-deep water at KR Circle underpass in Bengaluru, just a stone's throw from Vidhana Soudha, the seat of power of Karnataka.
More than 100 people have died in rain-hit Jammu and Kashmir, which is witnessing its worst flood in 50 years.
138 members of Bharat Scouts and Guides from West Bengal, mostly aged between 10 and 15 years, braved their way back to New Jalpaiguri railway station from Sikkim before heading home to Barrackpore near Kolkata to narrate their harrowing experience.
'One wrong input meant instead of rescuing one person, four people in the helicopter would gone down.' 'That was the risk I was supposed to take.' 'It was like balancing on a pin.' 'In an ordinary situation, I would not have done that operation at all because it was extremely risky. But this was an emergency.'
Around 200 heavily armed militants were waiting across the Line of Control to infiltrate into the Indian side even as the security forces foiled several attempts by the ultras to sneak into KashmirValley following the recent floods.
'The entire rescue operation was very dangerous, and something we have not experienced before.' 'It was different from what we experience on the seas.'
In Leh and Kargil, the army shifted 1000 people to safer areas in the past 24 hours.
The 77th Independence Day on Tuesday was a low-key affair in Himachal Pradesh with the traditional cultural programmes missing from official and district-level functions as the state mourns the deaths and destruction caused by incessant rains.
One more body was recovered on Thursday, taking the toll in multiple landslides in Mizoram's Aizawl district to 28, a police officer said.
With Tamil Nadu hit by floods, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday spoke to Chief Minister Jayalalithaa and assured her all possible support and cooperation from the Centre.
A Torpedo Recovery Vessel of the Indian Navy sunk off the Visakhapatnam coast on Thursday during a naval exercise, killing one sailor while four others went missing.
According to the police, 16-17 members of a family from Sayyad Nagar in Pune's Hadapsar area had hired a private bus to visit the scenic spot near Lonavala for a picnic on the rain-soaked day.
Rescue operations are in full swing in Uttarakhand where the death toll in the rain and floods has gone up to 150 as thousands of pilgrims still remained stranded.
The flood situation eased in Assam and northern districts of West Bengal with water receding and no fresh deaths being reported in both the states.
Tharoor said the fishermen took their boats inland and with their expert knowledge of the local conditions, their participation in the ongoing relief operations proved to be a gamechanger.
The families of workers missing from the Rishiganga hydel project site created a ruckus in Raini on Wednesday accusing the authorities of not carrying out the rescue operations properly after the sudden flood in the Alaknanda river system wreaked havoc.
Seventy army installations, including camps, bunkers and posts, have been hit by the devastating floods in the Kashmir Valley but security forces have swiftly relocated the damaged and washed out posts to plug the gaps in the sensitive border areas.
The flood-hit religious destinations of Kedarnath, Badrinath, Yamunotri and Gangotri, where rescue operations are underway, would again record heavy rains from Thursday, the India Meteorological Department said on Friday. It also predicted "rather heavy showers" in Hemkund Sahib, another religious destination hit by flash floods and heavy rains, from Wednesday.
'The 100-metre stretch from the opening of this tunnel is completely flooded with debris; the oxygen supply (through the pipes) too had gotten over and the chances of any survivors inside this tunnel are very bleak. Nobody has been able to talk to the people trapped inside'
For the first time in the last 26 years, a shutter of the Cheruthoni Dam was opened on Thursday.
A team of six trekkers from New Delhi and Shimla is missing in Kinnaur district, officials said. A rescue operation will be launched.
Food packets and water bottles were being aerially dropped to marooned people, he added.
Over 150 people have been killed and lakhs have been stranded in Jammu and Kashmir, which has been hit by the worst floods in five decades.
The biggest storm -- Typhoon Hagibis -- to hit Japan in decades left deaths and destruction in its wake, as it battered the central and eastern parts of the country. The storm flooded rivers and caused secondary weather patterns like tornados that destroyed homes and public property in areas east of Tokyo. Hagibis hit the capital, where streets were largely deserted and people were bunkered down, moving past the city by midnight, but not before flooding some sections. Reports state that the storm killed as many as 33 people and injured 186 others.
Nearly four lakh people have been affected across seven districts of Assam.
The rain ebbed in some places in north India and pelted down in others on Tuesday, with at least seven more people dead and hundreds stranded as raging waters gushed through villages, towns and fields -- from the desert state of Rajasthan to the hills of Himachal Pradesh.
