Unusually heavy rain and melting glaciers have brought deadly flash floods to the mountains of India and neighboring Pakistan and Nepal over the past year or two with government officials increasingly blaming climate change, Reuters reported.
"Again, tragedy has befallen Himachal Pradesh, with continuous rainfall over the past 48 hours," the state's chief minister, Sukhvinder Singh, said in a post on the messaging platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
"Reports of cloudbursts and landslides have emerged from various parts of the state resulting in loss of precious lives and property."
Reports of more casualties kept coming in on Monday as the chief minister inspected some of the damage.
In one the most deadly incidents, a temple collapsed in the state capital, Shimla, with rescuers pulling out at least nine bodies, the chief minister said.
In the Solan district, houses collapsed after a cloudburst, killing at least seven people, and a mother and her child were killed in the Mandi district when their house collapsed, said state disaster management official Praveen Bhardwaj.
AMK/PR