Flooding forces school closures in India’s Hyderabad

Normal life in Hyderabad has been brought to a grinding halt after torrential rain hit eastern India.

Some of the city streets have resembled rivers since the rain turned heavy on Wednesday. Traffic has found some of the roads impassable and residents have had to wade through waist-deep floodwater in some areas.

The rain was triggered by an area of low pressure which developed within the monsoon rains covering eastern India.

Hyderabad is not the only place to be hit. Much of the neighbouring states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have seen excessive amounts of rain.

Normally this region of India avoids the heaviest of the summer monsoon rains. It is sheltered by the Western Ghats, a mountain range that runs parallel to the west coast of India.

This ensures that Hyderabad normally receives 165mm of rain in September, far less than Mumbai’s average of 264mm.

However, this month has been far wetter than usual in Hyderabad. In just two days of this week, Wednesday and Thursday, Hyderabad was swamped by 160mm rain, almost the entire average expected in the month.

The Telangana government told Reuters news agency that it had shut down schools for two days starting on Friday and private companies told their employees to work from home. Train travel was also disrupted and people had to be airlifted to safety from several low-lying areas.

The rain is expected to continue across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh over the next few days, which is likely to cause further problems.

Despite the excessive amount of rain seen recently in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, as a whole, India has seen 4 percent less rain than average this year.