How the North India Floods Expose Climate Chaos and Broken Urban Infrastructure Systems

This year’s monsoon has rewritten the script for North India. The Indian Meteorological Department recorded the rainiest spell in over a decade, with rainfall nearly three times higher than average. Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, and Delhi were hit hardest.

Reportedly, at least 500 people have lost their lives; hundreds remain missing. Punjab saw 4.29 lakh acres of farmland washed away, while in Himachal, landslides buried homes and bridges. In Delhi, the Yamuna rose above danger levels, flooding neighbourhoods and forcing nearly 10,000 residents into temporary shelters. Kishtwar in Jammu and Kashmir counted 67 lives lost in a single surge. 

The North India floods of this year are symptoms of a deeper climate crisis colliding with fragile urban systems.

Fragile Hills, Flooded Plains

From the Himalayan towns to the cities of the plains, the crisis has unfolded as a chain reaction. In Manali, relentless rain and landslides cracked open roads and toppled houses. Vaishali Chauhan, a resident of Shimla, recounts somberly over the phone, “My parents built their house when they were young. It stood for decades, but this year it collapsed. Heavy constructions around us have made everything unstable. People say ‘you lost money’, no, we lost everything.”

Uttarakhand’s valleys echoed the same grief. Rambha Devi and many other villagers from Dharali described to me over a call the catastrophe that has come upon them, “The water tore through our fields and homes. New hotels and roads have cut into the land, and now we pay the price.” In Garhwali, she continues, “Unka khatar, jad do paisa bhi khatam hol, ta naya hotel banula. Hamara khatar, yo sirf zameen nhi dhoi gayi, yo to hamaro bhavikh chha. (For them, if just two pennies are lost, they will build new hotels. For us, it is not just land washed away, it is our future.)”

Downstream, the Yamuna’s swelling waters have turned Delhi into a city under siege. Laxman, a transgender shopkeeper near Kashmere Gate—whom we’ve accompanied on multiple queer heritage walks—tells me with tears in their eyes, “My shop is gone. I couldn’t even save my sewing machine. People see numbers on the news, but for me, it is my only home, my only livelihood, drowned.”

In Majnu ka Tila, Lama aunty, our beloved laphing queen from whom we make sure to eat every time we visit, a Tibetan shopkeeper who has had a shop near the Monastery for decades now, spoke in despair when we called her, “My shop has drowned. I don’t know when I can open it again, or if I ever can. How will I buy food? How will I pay for electricity for my children’s school? I sit every night looking at the water where my shop used to be and wonder how to start again.”

Punjab, too, stands gutted. Gurmeet Singh, an aid worker from Amritsar, warned, “When acres of farmland vanish underwater, it’s not just crops that are lost—it’s months of labour, generations of savings, and food for the future.” He describes to us with multiple distressing images of grains lost, fields flooded and people crying about how bad the situation is on the ground. As the banner at the GK-2 Gurdwara, appealing for donations and help for Punjab floods, flutters when we pass through it as we speak to Gurmeet over a disturbing video call, the horror seeps in.

The Climate Signal and Broken Systems

Scientists say these floods are not anomalies but the new reality. Pulkit Bajpai, who runs the Metropolitan Institute, a think-tank that is working on urban climate resilience, explained: “This summer was hotter than previous years, and the shift from extreme heat to cloudbursts fits the larger dynamics of climate variation. Hotter air holds more water vapour and releases it in short, intense bursts.”

Dikshu Kukreja, Managing Principal of CP Kukreja Architects, added: “This year’s rains are a reminder that the monsoon is no longer the familiar, predictable cycle we once knew. Rising sea temperatures are loading the atmosphere with far more moisture, which then gets released in shorter, sharper bursts. These extremes are no longer rare; they are fast becoming the new normal.”

But climate change isn’t acting alone—human negligence has made its impact devastating. Pulkit stressed: “Urbanisation in major cities has been carried out by paving over lakes, drain systems, and floodplains. These cities don’t flood because it rains; they flood because we removed the places where water could go.”

Kukreja pointed to Delhi and Gurgaon as proof: “The drainage networks here were designed decades ago for a very different scale of population and rainfall. Where there was once porous green cover, we now see impermeable concrete. Even moderate rain has nowhere to go but onto our streets.”

And what happens in the mountains doesn’t stay there. “Flooding in the plains cannot be understood in isolation,” Kukreja explained. “What happens upstream in the Himalayas—cloudbursts, landslides, or dam releases—inevitably finds its way downstream. Cities like Delhi sit at the receiving end of these cascading effects.”

Tourism and the Himalayan Imbalance

Tourism, once a lifeline, is now part of the problem—and the solution. “In regions like Uttarakhand, rapid development has brought both opportunities and challenges,” said Vibhas Prasad, Director of Leisure Hotels Group. “There is a growing awareness that construction in sensitive areas needs to be carefully managed to maintain ecological balance.”

The hospitality sector, too, is confronting climate realities. “Shifts in rainfall patterns have occasionally led to flooding or disruptions in connectivity,” Prasad explained. “It has emphasised the importance of building with resilience in mind and prioritising the safety of guests and locals alike.”

Vaishali’s parents state, “These hotel people and their damned logic of ‘hills are calling’ have destroyed all of us. Our lands lost, houses drowned, relatives dead. The government is no better.” In Mandiali, she laments, “Saade devta ta dekh rae ne, jad o jameen barbaad karde ne, te badle minj ae saja madi ae.(Our devtas are watching as they destroy land, and in return, this is our punishment.)”

On similar lines, Zahreen Khan, who is a student at Delhi University and a member of a hill conversation collective, says to us when we meet her, with tears in her eyes, “Among the people rescued yesterday were my parents. My house was just beside the Jhelum; it was so beautiful. We fought so hard to never convert it to a hotel or anything, despite multiple attempts from these people; now we will lose it all.”

Choosing Survival Over Surprise

The floods of 2025 are not isolated tragedies but warnings stitched into the landscape of North India. Pulkit summarised it best: “Flood risk in North India is the product of how we use land, how we run the river system, and whether we allow illegal construction to choke drainage.”

Unless resilience becomes central to policy and planning, the region will remain trapped in a cycle of grief. As Kukreja cautioned: “Unless urban planning in India evolves from reactive patchwork to proactive climate adaptation, we will remain unprepared for what lies ahead.”

Gurmeet says to us how Chandigarh is saved from floods due to better planning in passing and how the rest of Punjab is suffering so badly, “I watched yesterday a farmer tell me when I was rescuing him from his field and denying him to try and gather the crops, how government inaction and forgetfulness of their miseries will continue.”

As Delhi’s inland residents watch the Yamuna getting flooded over reels and state that Delhi does not flood, while Laxman and their trans sisters are finding a shelter in waist-deep waters, and as the Supreme Court yesterday calls upon the Central and state governments of the states, stating tree felling as a reason for major floods, the damage is already done and beyond repair. North India is now grasping for air.

For residents in Manali, farmers in Punjab, shopkeepers in Delhi, and villagers in Uttarakhand, the floods are not statistics but lived catastrophes. Their homes, fields, and futures are gone—swept away in waters that should have nourished, not destroyed. The monsoon has changed. Now it doesn’t come in sweet music and petrichor, it comes with horrors and alarms.