In July 2026, a stretch of the Yamunotri National Highway simply disappeared.
After days of incessant rain, a landslide came down at Syanachatti in Uttarakhand’s Uttarkashi district and washed away nearly 100 metres of the road. The highway was cut off for two days. Around 100 pilgrims were left stranded on the wrong side of the gap, until rescuers secured a rope along an alternative path and guided them across, one by one. That same weekend, heavy rain across Uttarakhand triggered landslides that blocked around 120 roads, including three national highways.
If you have travelled through the Himalayas during the rains, you may have seen a smaller version of this yourself. The bus stops. A little further ahead, mud has spilled across the road, or a section has cracked at the edge, or there is simply no road at all — only a raw brown scar running down the mountainside.
And it leaves you wondering: why do these roads keep washing away? It is easy to point at the rain. But the rain itself is changing. And so is the ground it falls on.
About this series
This story is part of “Climate Change, Explained Like You’re 10” — The Better India’s series that connects the things you see around you to a warming planet, in language simple enough to explain to your children. Because ‘climate change’ shouldn’t be a phrase reserved for scientists and summits. It’s already showing up on your street, in your tap, on your plate.
Why did 100 metres of highway simply wash away?
A road in the hills is not really on the ground. It is cut into a mountain.
Above the road at Syanachatti, as along most hill roads, is a slope — usually steep, made of layers of soil and rock. Below it may be a valley, a river, or a steep drop. Water has its own routes down these slopes, shaped over thousands of years. When a road is built, some of those natural contours have to be changed: the mountain is cut back, drainage is altered, vegetation is removed, and as traffic grows, the road is widened.
That same weekend, heavy rain across Uttarakhand triggered landslides that blocked around 120 roads, including three national highways. Photograph: (Bloomberg.com)
Most of the time, the slope holds. What tips it over is water — and specifically, a lot of water arriving very fast. The most extreme version of this has a name: a cloudburst. India’s weather department defines a cloudburst as more than 100 millimetres of rain falling in a single hour over a small area, roughly 20 to 30 square kilometres. That is close to a month’s worth of rain for many cities, dropped on one hillside in sixty minutes. The soil cannot absorb it fast enough.
Think of a sponge
Here is what all that water does to a slope.
Imagine a kitchen sponge. Pour a little water on it and it soaks it up. Keep pouring, and eventually it is full — water runs off, and the sponge grows heavy and sags. A mountain slope is far more complicated, but the same thing happens inside it. Soil has tiny spaces that water moves through. During very heavy rain, those spaces fill, the slope grows heavier, and water pressure builds inside the ground. On a steep or already-disturbed slope, that is often enough to break its grip.
This is not just a thought experiment. In the Himalayan town of Joshimath, Uttarakhand, investigating agencies found that water seeping underground — from poor drainage, wastewater and rain soaking into loose slope material — was steadily loosening the ground from within. When the water was there, the slope moved; as it drained away, the sinking slowed. Now picture that process sped up to a single night, driven by a downpour, on a slope with a road cut across it. That is what a washed-out hill road like Syanachatti really is.
Landslides are not new — but two things are changing
Mountain communities have lived with landslides for generations. Heavy rain, steep slopes and the region’s geology have always made parts of the Himalayas prone to them. Climate change did not invent landslides. What is changing is the rain that sets them off — and how much we build on the slopes.
A 2024 peer-reviewed study of the Rishikesh to Joshimath highway — the same road network that failed at Syanachatti — shows the second change clearly. Researchers examined a 247 kilometre stretch after the 2022 monsoon and recorded 309 landslides that had partly or completely blocked the road. Rainfall, slope, rock type and road widening all helped explain where they happened. After accounting for the other factors, the density of landslides was about twice as high along widened sections. The mountain is not being defeated by rain alone. Sometimes we have made its job harder.
So where does climate change come in?
The mountain has always been there — the steep slope, the loose rock, the road cut into the hillside. Those make a landslide possible. The rain is what sets it off. And the rain is changing.
A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body that reviews the science of climate change, uses a simple rule of physics: for every 1 degree Celsius of warming, air can hold around seven percent more water vapour. More available moisture means that when conditions line up, the downpour can be heavier — and the short, violent bursts that hill slopes handle worst become more likely. The IPCC’s most recent assessment reports that intense rainfall extremes are becoming more frequent as the planet warms. Closer to home, a 2023 study found extreme rainfall events in parts of India have risen by 20 to 50 percent in some regions since the 1950s.
If you have travelled through the Himalayas during the rains, you may have seen a smaller version of this yourself. Photograph: (Detroit Catholic)
You can see the consequences on the ground. In the 2023 monsoon, relentless rain across Himachal Pradesh submerged roads and washed away buildings, and the state estimated it would take a year to rebuild. Two years later, the Syanachatti washout and 120 blocked roads in a single weekend were the same story again.
So climate change is not adding new mountains or new roads. It is adding water — making the heavy rain that triggers these slides more intense, and sending it down onto slopes that were already fragile. The ground was always vulnerable; the sky is now delivering more of the one thing vulnerable ground cannot handle. That is why fixing the road after every landslide is not enough. The real question is what happened to the slope before the road failed — and whether the road was ever built with the mountain’s behaviour in mind.
The kitchen-table conversation
If you had to explain all this to a child at the dinner table, it might sound like this:
Child: “Why did the road just wash away?”
Parent: “Imagine a sponge. It soaks up some water, but if you keep pouring, it gets full and heavy. Mountain soil does the same — and then part of the slope can slide down, taking the road with it.”
Child: “But why is it happening more now?”
Parent: “Two reasons, and they add up. One is that we’ve been cutting and building on these slopes, which makes them weaker. The other is the rain.”
Child: “What’s happened to the rain?”
Parent: “The air is getting warmer, and warmer air holds more water. So when a big rain comes, it can come down harder than it used to. That’s the part climate change is changing — not the mountain, but how heavy the rain that hits it can be.”
Child: “So climate change makes the roads wash away?”
Parent: “It makes the heavy rain that washes them away stronger. The slope was already fragile. Climate change is loading more water onto it.”
Child: “Can we do anything about it?”
Parent: “Some of it, yes. That’s the good part.”
Soil has tiny spaces that water moves through. Photograph: (Newsonair)
What we can do – Real solutions we have covered at The Better India
The good news is that these ideas are already being put into practice. Here are a few people and communities showing what is possible.
IIT Mandi Built an Early Landslide Warning System & More Indian Cities Should Use It
How an IFS Officer Helped Rudraprayag Harvest Over 10 Million Litres of Rainwater
IFS Officer Revives 66 Himalayan Springs to Help 1 Lakh People in 23 Villages
None is a magic solution — a mountain is too complicated for that. But each shows something important: we can monitor a slope before it fails, give communities time to move, and think about how roads are built instead of treating the mountain as something to be cut out of the way.
The next time you sit in a car waiting for a landslide to be cleared, perhaps you will look at the hill above you a little differently.
