5 Years of Monsoon Deaths in Vidarbha: A Crisis That Few Are Tracking

thenewsdirt
Jul 9
11 min read

In the first week of July 2022, two schoolboys in Wardha district waded into a swollen village stream and never returned home. Aged just 14 and 15, they were swept away by a sudden flood; one body was later found downstream while the other remained missing.

That same weekend, a family of three travelling by truck in neighbouring Gadchiroli district perished when monsoon torrents overturned their vehicle into a raging nullah; their bodies were discovered tangled in the branches of a tree after the waters receded.

Such tragic incidents have played out repeatedly across Vidarbha over the past five years. While mega-disasters in metropolitan regions make headlines, the steady drip of rain-related deaths in this central Indian region has formed an overlooked crisis.

Year after year, villagers, farmers, and children lose their lives to floods, lightning, and collapsing homes, a seasonal emergency largely unnoticed outside the local area.

Five Years of Monsoon Fatalities in Vidarbha (2020–2024)

Official records and news reports reveal that since 2020, dozens of people in Vidarbha have died in incidents directly caused by heavy rains.

In 2020, torrential rains in late August led to severe flooding across eastern Vidarbha. Rivers like the Wainganga and Pench swelled to dangerous levels, inundating parts of Nagpur, Bhandara, Gondia, Chandrapur and Gadchiroli districts.

More than 92,000 people were affected, and about 55,000 had to be evacuated to safety as entire villages were marooned. Remarkably, and owing to timely mass evacuations, no loss of human life was reported in that 2020 flooding episode.

Rescue operations by the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and the Army ensured people were moved out of harm’s way in time, averting casualties even as over 23,000 homes were damaged in the deluge.

The 2020 floods demonstrated Vidarbha’s capacity to handle a one-off crisis, but they were only the beginning of an emerging pattern of deadly monsoons.

By 2021, the region was experiencing more erratic and extreme weather. In late September that year, a spell of heavy rain and thunderstorms struck parts of Vidarbha and the adjacent Marathwada region.

Intense cloudbursts caused flash floods and triggered frequent lightning strikes. At least 13 people were killed across Maharashtra during that bout of extreme weather, 4 of them in Vidarbha.

Three victims were from Yavatmal district and one from Buldhana, all fatally struck by lightning amid the storms. In one incident on 28 September 2021, a state transport bus trying to cross a flooded bridge in Yavatmal was swept off the road by the raging water.

One passenger drowned and several others went missing in that bus tragedy, underscoring how quickly a normally dry river can turn deadly during the monsoon. The 2021 monsoon thus left its mark on Vidarbha with lives lost to both lightning and sudden floods, a grim harbinger of what was to come in subsequent years.

The 2022 monsoon brought a series of cloudbursts and persistent rain that battered the region in July. Over 24 hours on July 10–11, 2022, Vidarbha was lashed by incessant downpours, leading to flooded roads and overflowing streams in multiple districts. Six people lost their lives in that period to rain-related incidents. Gadchiroli district alone accounted for four deaths, including the family of three who were caught in an overflowing stream at night.

In Wardha district, two young cousins were swept away by a flooded local nullah (drainage channel) while playing, tragically adding to the toll.

The disasters prompted red-alert warnings in places like Gadchiroli, where authorities shut schools and offices for three days and evacuated over 350 people from low-lying villages as a precaution. Despite these measures, the 2022 rains proved lethal in isolated pockets, illustrating the challenge of protecting every remote hamlet from flash floods.

Monsoon 2023 turned out to be one of the worst in recent memory for Vidarbha. A sustained spell of heavy rainfall in July 2023 caused widespread flooding and destruction across both the western (Amravati division) and eastern (Nagpur division) parts of the region.

Within ten days in mid-July, at least 19 people were killed in rain-related incidents across Vidarbha’s eleven districts.

Almost every district saw casualties as rivers overflowed and torrential rain fell day after day. Official reports show that in the Nagpur division (eastern Vidarbha), Gadchiroli and Bhandara each recorded three deaths, Gondia and Wardha had two each, and Chandrapur reported one fatality during that period.

Meanwhile, in the western Vidarbha (Amravati division), a single day of extreme rainfall, July 21, 2023, claimed five lives in flash floods. Yavatmal district was hardest hit, with three people dying that day, while Akola and Buldhana reported one death each. The very next day, three more villagers in the Amravati district were swept away and drowned.

By late July 2023, thousands of houses (nearly 4,500 by official count) had been damaged by flooding in Vidarbha, and over 2,700 people had to be shifted to relief camps for safety. The 2023 monsoon’s deadly impact finally drew some broader attention, Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister even visited the region and assured that the government was “fully prepared” to tackle the rain havoc. Despite those assurances, the damage was done. nearly 54,000 hectares of crops were ravaged, and dozens of families were left grieving loved ones.

Last year, 2024, continued the sobering trend, though with slightly less fanfare. Instead of a single massive flood, the region saw multiple smaller-scale disasters through the monsoon months.

Continuous heavy rains in July 2024 inundated parts of western Vidarbha, ruining crops on an estimated 40,000 hectares of farmland and affecting around 50,000 farmers.

Then, in September 2024, an intense overnight downpour in the Gondia district (eastern Vidarbha) resulted in a tragic building collapse.

In the early hours of 10 September, after 292 mm of rain fell in 24 hours, a two-storey house in Gondia city’s Fulchurtola area buckled and crumbled to the ground. Two people sleeping inside were crushed to death in the collapse.

That same storm system flooded several parts of Gondia, a petrol tanker was swept off a highway by an overflowing river, and emergency crews had to rescue worshippers stranded at a temple by sudden floodwaters.

Such incidents were typical of 2024’s monsoon in Vidarbha. Deadly local disasters that briefly made news in the region, even as they went largely unnoticed in the national press. By the end of the 2024 rainy season, Maharashtra’s relief department was once again tallying up homes destroyed and announcing ex-gratia payments to the next of kin of victims, in what had become an all-too-familiar annual ritual.

How the Rains Claim Lives: Floods, Lightning and Collapse

A closer look at these incidents reveals common causes behind the rain-related deaths. Drowning in flash floods is the single biggest risk.

Many victims are swept away by suddenly overflowing rivers, streams, and drainage channels after intense cloudbursts. Villagers attempting to cross flooded roads or bridges, as in the Yavatmal bus incident of 2021, can be caught off guard by the force of water.

In rural Yavatmal and Amravati, there have been cases of people washed away while simply walking home or tending cattle when a normally tame river turns into a torrent.

Children are especially vulnerable. The Wardha tragedy in 2022, where two minors were pulled under by a rain-swollen stream, underscores how quickly an afternoon of play can turn fatal when the weather changes. Even seasoned adults misjudge the power of flash flood.

In the Gadchiroli case, a 50-year-old farmer and his family tried to drive a truck through a flooded route at night and were swept off the road. Rescue officials note that just a few inches of fast-moving water can knock down or carry away a person, and yet many remote villages lack early warning systems or barricades to block flooded crossings.

Lightning strikes are another frequent killer during Vidarbha’s monsoons. This region’s topography and climate make it a lightning hotspot, particularly in the early and late monsoon. In 2021, for instance, lightning bolts claimed at least four lives in Vidarbha within two days.

Three farmers in Yavatmal were fatally struck while working in their fields, and a 17-year-old boy in Buldhana died when lightning hit near his home. Maharashtra’s government data show that lightning and thunderstorms account for a significant share of monsoon fatalities each year. Victims often are rural residents who take shelter under trees or in open fields when storms suddenly roll in.

Without reliable lightning alert systems at the village level, people have little warning, a reality that turned deadly in September 2021 when severe thunderstorms blew up with scant notice.

Statewide, 56 people were killed by lightning in Maharashtra in the first two months of the 2021 monsoon alone, a large portion of them in Vidarbha and Marathwada. The grisly irony is that after enduring months of drought, villagers sometimes rush outdoors at the sight of rain, only to be caught in lethal electrical storms.

Poor infrastructure and weak housing structures further amplify the monsoon’s human toll. Many homes in interior Vidarbha are built with mud bricks or cheap materials that do not withstand heavy rain. Wall collapses and roof cave-ins thus occur during almost every bout of prolonged rainfall.

The Gondia incident in 2024, where a two-storey house collapsed and killed two people, is a stark example. In that case, continuous rain had likely weakened the old structure’s foundation. Similarly, urban flooding in smaller cities like Akola and Amravati has led to accidents such as electrocutions (from inundated power lines) and injuries due to open drains, although fatality figures from those are harder to pin down.

Traffic accidents on slippery roads are another hazard. In June 2025, for instance, Maharashtra officials reported several road crash deaths attributed to rainy conditions, including cases in Vidarbha.

Even falling trees, soaked and loosened at the roots by weeks of rain, have caused casualties, as happened in Gondia in July 2025, when a motorcyclist was crushed by a tree felled during a storm.

Each of these causes, drowning, lightning, structural collapse, and accidents, adds a few names to the monsoon death toll every year. Individually, they might seem like isolated mishaps, but collectively, they point to a broader systemic vulnerability whenever the skies open up over Vidarbha.

An Unnoticed Crisis and the Cost of Inattention

Despite the regularity of rain-related deaths in Vidarbha, these tragedies have remained a largely unnoticed emergency in the public sphere.

Local newspapers and regional editions dutifully report each incident, the drowned farmer, the collapsed house, the lightning fatality, yet they seldom register in state or national headlines.

Part of the reason is that the fatalities are scattered in place and time. Unlike a single cataclysmic flood that grabs immediate attention, Vidarbha’s monsoon toll accrues through numerous micro-disasters in remote corners. The victims are often rural villagers or urban poor, far from the media glare of Mumbai or Delhi. Even within Maharashtra, greater focus tends to fall on the coastal Konkan region’s dramatic landslides or the floods in metropolitan Mumbai. In contrast, a death in Chandrapur or Bhandara due to rain can become just a statistic in a government report.

Veteran journalists note that issues in Vidarbha have historically struggled to attract mainstream media attention.

The region is more commonly discussed in the context of drought and farmer suicides, an agrarian crisis that is indeed severe. Ironically, when excess rain then causes equal calamity, it does not fit the usual narrative and thus gains little traction. “Vidarbha’s villages can go from drought to deluge in a matter of weeks, but the outside world barely notices,” remarks a senior reporter from Nagpur. This sentiment is echoed by local media initiatives committed to amplifying Vidarbha’s grassroots stories “ignored by mainstream media”.

The persistent monsoon fatalities form one such story. For the families of the victims, of course, these losses are anything but unseen. Every name behind the numbers represents a devastated household, whether it’s the parents who lost two young sons in Wardha’s floodwaters, or the relatives mourning a breadwinner struck by lightning in Yavatmal.

The government’s response to these incidents has largely been reactive. State officials routinely announce compensation for the bereaved and assistance for rebuilding. For example, after the spate of July 2023 deaths, Maharashtra’s relief ministry released ₹4 lakh (approximately $5,000) as ex-gratia aid to each victim’s family.

Families affected by flooding were given small relief kits and a few thousand rupees to get by. Such aid is undoubtedly crucial for those who have lost everything, but it addresses the symptoms rather than the cause. Long-term measures, like strengthening village infrastructure, improving drainage, creating localised weather alert systems, and educating communities on monsoon safety, have seen slower progress. Local authorities do issue alerts and sometimes evacuate high-risk areas, as in Gadchiroli in 2022, but these efforts are inconsistent across districts.

Disaster management officers admit that with thousands of small villages spread across Vidarbha’s plains and forests, it is a daunting task to fully safeguard everyone during extreme weather.

The result is that each year’s monsoon season resembles the last: warnings are sounded, disasters happen regardless, and then relief camps are set up post-factum.

For now, the cycle of heavy rain and quiet tragedy persists. The people of Vidarbha have little choice but to brace for the monsoon, even as they pray that they will not be the next headline in the local news. “It’s terrifying when the rains get heavy – we don’t sleep, we keep checking the river,” said a farmer from a flood-prone hamlet in Bhandara.

His village was evacuated in 2020 and again in 2023, and he counts himself lucky that “only the crop was lost, not our lives.” Many others have not been so fortunate. Their deaths may not spark nationwide outrage or prime-time debates, but for their loved ones and communities, the loss is deeply felt. As another monsoon approaches its peak, residents and observers alike are left to wonder how many more lives will be quietly lost before this hidden crisis is finally acknowledged for what it is.

Each casualty is a stark reminder that even as the rains bring much-needed water to Vidarbha’s fields, they also exact a hidden human cost, one that the region can ill afford to ignore any longer.

Over the last five years, the monsoon in Vidarbha has transitioned from a season of hope to one of anxiety and grief for many communities. From flash floods that strike without warning to bolts of lightning from the blue, the forces of nature have turned fatal with alarming regularity. This unfolding emergency remains largely unacknowledged outside the region, even as local families rebuild their lives each year in the aftermath of the rains.

The stories of Vidarbha’s rain victims underscore a simple fact. The impact of climate extremes is felt not just in headline-grabbing catastrophes, but also in the cumulative toll of smaller tragedies.

For Vidarbha’s people, each monsoon now carries a dual face, nurturing life and taking it, and until effective preventive measures catch up, they will continue living on an uneasy edge, hoping that next year’s rains do not make victims of their own. The past five years have been a poignant testament to that reality, urging a future where these deaths are no longer met with deafening silence.