In July 2023, relentless downpours fuelled by a rare convergence of Western Disturbances and a vigorous southwest monsoon unleashed havoc across the Yamuna basin, with Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana and Delhi turning into a cauldron of chaos.
Overtopping embankments and swamping central Delhi, Yamuna had crossed its highest mark in over four decades. The Central Water Commission reported that the river surged past the old flood record of 207.4 m, set in 1978, climbing to a staggering 208.6 m at the old Delhi railway bridge on July 13.
The deluge transformed arteries like ITO and Rajghat into waterways. The Supreme Court lawns lay underwater. Power substations failed, and vital government offices were rendered non-functional. Houses, roads, and commuters all bore witness to the river’s ferocious leap into the urban heart.
In early September 2025, the capital crawled back into that mayhem again as heavy rainfall upstream and huge discharges from the Hathnikund barrage in Haryana sent the Yamuna surging through Delhi. It peaked at 207.4 m at the Old Railway Bridge on September 4, making it the third-highest level since 1963.
Chaos reigns supreme
In 2023, floodwater gushed into the regulators and storm drains, spilling onto Ring Road, ITO, Civil Lines and even into the compounds of Lutyens’ Delhi. Members of Parliament found their homes inundated, carpets ruined, pumps malfunctioning and water tankers summoned to meet basic needs. Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, who resides in central Delhi, was among the first to publicly acknowledge that his home had been overtaken by the rising water.
In a viral video, Samajwadi Party MP Ram Gopal Yadav was seen being carried by his staff members on their shoulders through waist-deep water so that he could reach his car and attend Parliament sessions. Former CM Atishi too had found her Mathura Road residence marooned by floodwater.
With pumps failing and supply lines disrupted after treatment plants went offline, even the homes of lawmakers turned to water tankers to secure drinking water.
The city’s premier hospitals also took a brunt of the calamity. The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), alongside other hospitals, faced severe waterlogging that paralysed medical services during the crisis. The deluge bore down on the AIIMS’ nerve centres. Basements of the Trauma Centre and the Cardiothoracic & Neurosciences Centre were inundated, cutting power and flooding surgery zones in knee-deep water. Staff battled not just water seepage but also non-functional air conditioning, damp walls, and compromised electrical systems.
The hospital was forced to reroute emergency surgical cases to Safdarjung Hospital and other nearby government facilities. Lifts were rendered inoperable, and even the tunnel connecting the Trauma Centre to the main block was inaccessible for a couple of days. The RML Hospital’s emergency access was briefly flooded, hindering patients and attendants from reaching critical care areas. At the Delhi government-run Sushruta Trauma Centre, located in North Delhi, doctors and nurses struggled as floodwater gushed into the premises. Around 40 patients, including three on ventilators, were hurriedly shifted to Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Hospital.
Meanwhile, families attempting to perform last rites were left stranded after floodwater shut down cremation grounds at Nigambodh Ghat, Geeta Colony and Wazirabad, forcing desperate recourse to open grounds for cremations.
The Delhi Jal Board was forced to shut its Wazirabad and Chandrawal water treatment plants for several days, cutting off a large part of the city’s potable supply. Tankers were deployed across neighbourhoods, but the demand far outstripped supply. Residents complained of long waits and bitterly noted that if MPs had to summon tankers for their official bungalows, ordinary families in working-class colonies had little chance of timely delivery.
This year, the taps didn’t run dry, as the water treatment plants were not shut entirely. However, water supply to several areas was hit after the Wazirabad Water Treatment Plant scaled down production by 20%. Rising turbidity and silt levels in Yamuna followed.
The capital’s roads had turned treacherous even this time. Entire stretches of Ring Road and ITO disappeared under fast-flowing water, trapping buses, cars and trucks.
In 2023, the Delhi Disaster Management Authority shut schools, colleges and non-essential offices, advised private companies to switch to remote work, diverted interstate buses away from Kashmere Gate ISBT, and imposed restrictions on heavy goods vehicles at the city’s borders.
The floods spared nobody; animals too endured the wrath. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi had to clear more than a thousand carcasses to prevent outbreaks of disease. Although not as devastating, the 2025 flood echoed similar scenes. Several low-lying neighbourhoods, including areas around the Old Railway Bridge, Red Fort, underpasses, and flyovers, were choked due to waterlogging. The historic Iron Bridge (Loha Pul) had also come to a standstill. Thousands were forced to wade through floodwaters in parts of the city.
Exodus yet again
By official records, more than 25,000 people were relocated from floodplains and riverfront slums during the floods in 2023.
The displaced were housed in relief camps hastily set up in schools, dharamshalas and community halls across north and east Delhi. Rows of cots, mattresses and tarpaulin shelters became temporary homes for families who had lost not just their dwellings but also their means of livelihood.
All day long, community kitchens ladled out khichdi, dal-rice, and steaming cups of tea, while tankers quenched thirst with precious drinking water. The relief camps pulsed with the cries of children squeezed into makeshift spaces, as women queued patiently for sanitary kits and essential medicines handed out by NGOs and health workers. Volunteers tried to restore a sense of normalcy with impromptu lessons for schoolchildren, while doctors moved from tent to tent, fending off the risk of waterborne diseases.
For the displaced, life narrowed to a single rhythm of waiting. Waiting for the floodwaters to ebb, waiting for word of livestock and belongings swallowed by the river, and waiting for the fragile hope that homes wrested back from the Yamuna could once again be lived in. This year once again thousands of families living along the riverbanks were forced to abandon their homes.
By September 5, nearly 10,000 people had been moved to government-run relief shelters across north and east Delhi. According to official figures, 8,018 evacuees were accommodated in makeshift tents, while another 2,030 found space in permanent shelters such as schools and community halls.
The camps, spread across 38 locations, were meant to provide immediate refuge but revealed the familiar strains of Delhi’s disaster response system. Basic bedding, drinking water supplied through tankers, and community kitchens were all they got.
Conditions were far from comfortable. Cramped shelters left little privacy, and sanitation facilities were quickly overwhelmed. Women queued for hours for sanitary kits, while parents worried about children exposed to mosquitoes and stagnant water outside the camps. NGOs and health teams conducted daily medical checks to guard against diarrhoea and vector-borne diseases like dengue and malaria.
Schools turned into temporary shelters doubled up as classrooms by day, with volunteer teachers keeping children occupied. The Delhi government and civic agencies coordinated with local NGOs to distribute medicines and hygiene essentials, but many residents complained that food supplies were irregular and water tankers were insufficient for the rising demand.
Despite these challenges, the camps became spaces of solidarity. Volunteers organised informal prayer meetings and recreational activities for children, while doctors reassured displaced families. Yet the atmosphere was marked by uncertainty: many evacuees wondered if their flooded homes would be made habitable again or if Yamuna would reclaim their homes in future floods.
Role of the ITO Barrage
At the core of the 2023 crisis lay the ageing ITO Barrage, built in the 1960s to supply cooling water to now-decommissioned power stations. It had no design for flood control and remained under Haryana Irrigation Department’s jurisdiction.
A post-flood inspection revealed that at least five gates were jammed—caked with silt, mechanically compromised, with detached ropes and counters—rendering them partially or wholly inoperable. The Central Water Commission acknowledged that such obstruction prevented the river from flowing freely and disrupted flood forecasting.
Part of the trouble lies in its ownership. Though the barrage sits in the heart of Delhi, its administrative control rests with the Haryana Irrigation Department. During the 2023 floods, the tension boiled over. The Aam Aadmi Party administration accused Haryana of ignoring routine upkeep, while Haryana countered that the barrage was never meant to serve as a flood-control structure.
As the blame game unfolded, soldiers from the Indian Army and divers from the Indian Navy were called in to manually clear the silted gates. This time, however, officials at the irrigation and flood control departments said that they were better prepared, with all ITO barrage gates open and all the important regulators closed.
The drain that failed all
Even as the Yamuna rose menacingly, one of Delhi’s key flood shields gave way—regulator no. 12 at ITO. Nestled between the WHO office and the Ring Road, it was designed like a one-way valve, blocking the river from gushing into city drains while letting stormwater slip out to the Yamuna. But once the river breached the 208 m mark, the barrier buckled, and the city’s last line of defence collapsed under the surge.
The government later admitted that the regulator was last repaired in 2015. Rusting gates, eroded concrete and inadequate reinforcement made it vulnerable.
Water surged backwards into Delhi’s drainage system, using the city’s own network of stormwater channels as conduits. By the time the government repaired the broken regulator, central Delhi had been under water for days.
A Parliamentary Standing Committee on water resources flagged the failure of the regulator as a major cause of the ITO flooding and crit cised years of deferred maintenance. Delhi’s demand to gain control over the ITO Barrage intensified in the aftermath. Officials argued that only direct authority would ensure timely maintenance during emergencies. Haryana, however, stood its ground, insisting that relinquishing control was neither feasible nor covered by prior agreements.
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on water resources weighed in, urging the Union ministry to act as an “honest broker” in resolving the stalemate. The committee stressed that the barrage’s future role in flood management had to be clarified once and for all. Although no such drain regulators failed this time around, a breach in the Mungeshpur drain sent a violent rush of water across the Najafgarh–Bahadurgarh stretch, inundating parts of the Delhi–Haryana border and forcing the relocation of nearly 2,000 people. The overflow poured into Delhi’s settlements, including Jharoda and several nearby unauthorised colonies, with residents saying homes were swamped within hours.
CWC and Parliamentary panel findings
Multiple investigations by the Central Water Commission and the Parliamentary Standing Committee pointed to a web of causes: unprecedented rainfall; faulty hydrological data from Hathnikund, Wazirabad and Okhla barrages; silt-clogged gates; encroachment of floodplains; and fragmentation of the Yamuna corridor by infrastructure projects.
According to the parliamentary panel, the flood closely matched a one-in-50-year event, though extreme flows far above design thresholds overwhelmed defences. It noted serious discrepancies in recorded discharge figures and highlighted that Delhi’s floodplain had been compromised by roads, metrorail construction yards and landfilling—all factors that aggravated afflux.
The Committee called out inadequate environmental flow maintenance—asking for at least 23 cumecs of water to be released during lean months at Hathnikund, up from the current inadequate 10 cusecs.
It lamented that the lack of coordination among Delhi, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh over barrage operations hampers effective flood response. In early September 2025, the CWC and Ministry of Jal Shakti submitted a joint report to the National Green Tribunal underscoring the urgent need for interstate coordination and proposing a formal panel to manage Delhi’s three critical barrages—ITO, Okhla and Wazirabad—effectively during monsoon.