Why the flood did not end when the water receded in this Maharashtra village

A devastating flood in Maharashtra’s drought-prone Solapur district continues to shape everyday life through debt, crop loss and migration. Solapur, Maharashtra: Vijaya Raserao (58) did not flinch as she slipped her feet into chappals heated by the punishing April sun in Maharashtra’s Solapur district. Standing outside farmer Nakusa Tukaram Khade’s home in Shingoli village, she called out impatiently, “Be sure to get the wages by evening. We have to pay the loan instalment, that’s why we are in a rush.” Vijaya Raserao is a farm labourer in Shingoli, a village in Mohol taluka on the banks of the Sina river. On September 22, 2025, during the retreating monsoon, the Sina swelled into what residents called a Mahapoor or a mega flood. The neighbouring districts of Ahilyanagar, where the river originates, and Beed and Dharashiv were also hit. All 195 homes in Shingoli were inundated and in some parts of the village, the water rose above rooftops. Six months have passed and the floodwaters have receded, but the flood still lingers, shaping everyday life in Shingoli. Farm labourers and farmers alike are trapped in debt, travelling to neighbouring villages in search of work, or preparing to leave for cities like Pune and Mumbai. The climate behind the crisis Solapur district is known as Maharashtra's "sugar belt," but it sits in a semi-arid stretch of the Deccan Plateau, historically drought-prone, with temperatures that have risen by approximately 3°C since the 1990s. Research by Prathmesh Bansode and Dr Deepak K Dede has documented a near-steady upward trend in mean temperature from 1990 to 2021, alongside growing variability in annual rainfall. "Erratic heavy showers followed by long dry periods exacerbate soil erosion and nutrient loss," their paper has noted. September 2025 was a violent expression of that volatility. Solapur received 125%  higher rainfall than its seasonal average from June to September; for September alone, the average rainfall was 175% of its normal, according to the Hindustan Times. Excessive rainfall in a short period caused rivers, streams, canals and reservoirs across the region to overflow simultaneously, noted the National Alliance for People's Movements' study, Maharashtratil Mahapoor: Abhyas Ahval 2025. The NAPM report is careful to separate the cause from the amplifier. Climate change is at the root of increased and unpredictable rainfall — but defective government policy, administrative irresponsibility, and infrastructure decisions made years before the rain began are what turned extreme weather into disaster.  Location of Sina river basin in Maharashtra, India. The Sina is a tributary of the east-flowing Bhima river, which meets the Krishna that flows into the Bay of Bengal (Photo sources - Bharti, Vikram & Thendiyath, Roshni & Jha, Madan & Ghorbani, Mohammad Ali & Ragab, Osama, 2023)  A disaster in making  When residents of Bhim Nagar Lokvasti describe the flood, almost every account eventually arrives at the same structure: the National Highway. NH 166 runs through this area, its elevated embankment cutting across the floodplain. "The highway acted like the wall of a dam," said Pandurang Raserao, the Up Sarpanch of Shingoli. "If there were more viaducts, it would have allowed the water to flow out. We had brought these problems to the notice of various officials, but no changes were made to the alignment." The National Highways Authority of India disagreed. "NH 166 has been designed according to the Highest Flood Level provided by the concerned department," said NHAI officer Swapnil Kasar in Solapur, adding that floodwater spreads based on topography, and that additional viaducts would not significantly have reduced inundation. The Disaster Management Officer of Solapur, Shaktisagar Dhole, contextualises the complexity: river flow remains largely uncontrolled and dependent on rainfall intensity and upstream runoff, making accurate prediction of water levels and inundation extent genuinely difficult. But the highway is not the only intervention residents point to. Ratnadeep Gaikwad describes a Sina river that has been systematically weakened: floodplain boundaries that the Irrigation Department has never formally demarcated, dozens of cement wells sunk into the riverbed drawing water for private and industrial use, and large-scale sand mining conducted under cover of official tolerance. "The government itself is harming the Sina river," he says. "Our only demand is that our river should be protected and that Shingoli, and Bhim Nagar Lokvasti, should be saved." Debt and daily survival Back in Bhim Nagar Lokvasti — the Scheduled Caste settlement of Shingoli, less than 500 metres from the Sina — the flood's aftermath is visible in every yard and on every wall. Vijaya Raserao's neighbour and sister-in-law Sunanda Tanaji Raserao, 50, is meticulously cleaning grain on her traditional stone-grinder. A 15-day-old buffalo calf hides from the 40-degree heat beneath a charpai. It is hard to imagine the same yard submerged, but a 10-foot dark stain on the outer wall tells the story precisely. "See this dark patch? The walls of the house are still wet. This is how high the water was," Sunanda Tanaji Raserao showed 101Reporters. The water gave people only enough time to grab basic belongings and reach higher ground. What was left behind in Sunanda Tanaji Raserao's yard: a damaged stereo system worth over Rs. 1 lakh, her son's ice cream cart, a rusted cooling box, broken toilets, and a cooler. None of it has been replaced or repaired. "We don't have money to buy a new cooler. There's simply no work," she said. In times of escalating temperatures, the absence of a cooler is a grim situation for the family that often toils through the day in the hot sun. Sunanda Tanaji Raserao stands before the wet walls of their home, which they haven’t been able to fix for lack of funds (Photo - Shatakshi Gawade, 101Reporters) A few houses away, Lakshmy Dilip Raserao, 65, faced  the same arithmetic of unrepaired loss. The flood eroded a pillar at the base of her house, cracked the walls, and left them damp. Leaking tin sheets on the roof remain unchanged. "We can't even fix the roof. We have no work, and the priority is our children's education," she added. Her family took a loan from a private bank, but it has not stretched far enough to replace a washing machine, a fridge, her son Anil's sound system, or the three sewing machines, her personal source of income, that were destroyed. She borrowed a fourth machine from her daughter and now stitches together what she can, literally and otherwise. She also lost five goats; since blocked roads prevented a veterinary post-mortem, they were not eligible for government compensation. Lakshmy Dilip Raserao’s sewing machines which was damaged in the flood (Photo - Shatakshi Gawade, 101Reporters) The scale of what is missing is less remarkable than how ordinary its absence has become. Rabi crops — wheat, jowar, bajra, soybean — could not be sown after the flood. Without standing crops, there is no farm work. Without farm work, Vijaya, Sunanda and Lakshmy have nothing. "What do we have without the farmer?" Lakshmy said. "How are we supposed to sustain our lives? If the farms yield crops, we eat. Otherwise, what are we to do? We simply sit idle — like stones — for what else is there to do?" "We have to keep borrowing money to keep our households running," said Vijaya simply. Sunanda has a Self-Help Group loan of Rs 5,000 per month; her son carries a separate loan for his defunct sound system. "We have to starve ourselves to pay off our loans."  There were discussions about a loan waiver. Nothing came of them. NAPM National Convener Suniti SR confirmed that appeals were made to banks to defer installments. The banks declined, saying the decision was beyond their authority. Social activist Keval Phadtare, who helped coordinate relief for Shingoli during the flood, said that some banks went further, warning women that a waived loan would disqualify them from future credit. "So these women have been forced to borrow more money to repay their initial loans," he said No farming, no work The flood's impact on agricultural land was structural. Of Shingoli's 3,500 hectares of farmland, roughly 2,500 hectares were submerged, estimated the Up Sarpanch Pandurang Rasero. Across 11 talukas in Solapur district, 19,891 farmers lost a combined 12,124 hectares of farmland, according to the Hindustan Times. Kharif crops such as pigeon pea, black gram, sugarcane were lost. The Sina deposited sludge and boulders across fields, washed away fertile topsoil, and in places physically removed the land itself. A majority of the farmers in the village belong to the upper caste Maratha community. To explain the scale of the devastation Dnyaneshwar Suresh Kasture walked 101Reporters to the edge of a field by the river to point to where his land used to be. The water has gouged a hole of roughly 12 gunthe into his property; mud and rocks displaced by the flood landed in adjacent fields, forming a waist-deep layer. Sugarcane planted across 2.75 acres, a crop that would have yielded 170 tonnes, was washed away. The water level in the exposed area still fluctuates but Kasture does not even know how deep the hole is. "I'm not able to farm in either part of my land. It has essentially become barren and infertile," he said.  The pipelines he relied on were also washed away. Electricity poles fell and were repaired only recently. Kasture added that he is not willing to take another loan to rehabilitate the land as he has already absorbed more debt than he wants to name. "Taking loans repeatedly is not an option. We need alternatives for a livelihood." He pauses, then says something that would be unthinkable from a farmer in an ordinary year: "At the very least, we need a place to be resettled." The Sina river simply gouged away the land in Dnyaneshwar Suresh Kasture’s fields (Photo - Shatakshi Gawade, 101Reporters) “We have appealed for resettlement, but we haven’t heard back from the officials yet,” said Pandurang. While resettlement is at the top of several villagers’ minds irrespective of their status as land-owning farmers or landless labour, Suniti SR proposes a different approach, “There are many villages like Shingoli who are asking for resettlement. But before that step is taken, we need to look at the systems that caused this. Action needs to be taken to ensure water doesn’t enter settlements at all.” On a neighbouring farm, Sangeeta Khatke's family faced a different kind of ruin. Their 4.5 acres were entirely flooded and buried in sludge. Over 2.5 months after the water abated, they deployed tractors, JCB equipment and hired labourers to clean the fields, an expense that absorbed the money they might have used for the rabi season. Time lost to cleaning was a sowing season lost. "We had to leave one plot of land untended. We simply couldn't afford to clean it," she said, making rotis for lunch. The most precarious situation belongs to Tirupati Narayan Hakke, 38, who has not yet had a single full season since the flood. "Almost 1.5 acres of my land is still under water right now. Every 1.5 months the river rises and my farm floods again," he said. "It flooded just two days ago and I lost another crop." He has suffered losses of over Rs. 1 lakh in sugarcane, urad, toor, corn and cattle fodder alone. His costs to rehabilitate the land are estimated at Rs 2.5 lakh. Government compensation has not come close to covering it. "Now I will have to become a driver," he said as he waited for a fractured leg to heal before he could start. In the absence of the most basic resources for agriculture – land and money – expert suggestions to ensure climate resilience, such as drought-resilient crops, organic farming and agroforestry, look like a distant dream in villages like Shingoli. The village emptying Migration from Shingoli is not new. Sakharam Gaikwad has lived in Mumbai for nearly five years because he owns no land. But what is happening now is different in kind, says Pandurang: "Some people migrated for work even before the flood. But that was for jobs. Now people are leaving because the previous work has stopped." Of Shingoli's population of roughly 1,800, Pandurang estimates that close to half have already moved — to their farms, to other villages, or to Pune, Mumbai and Kolhapur. "In November, since there was no work available, people left. Now the remaining people are also considering leaving, especially after the village festival on May 24." Migrations are not new for Shingoli. Sakharam Gaikwad has been living in Mumbai for almost five years for work because he does not own land for farming, shared his sister Muktabai (Photo - Shatakshi Gawade, 101Reporters) Farmer and autorickshaw driver Ratnadeep Dagdu Gaikwad, who splits his time between Shingoli and Pune, described what he sees: "Farmers suffered during the flood, but the larger suffering continued afterward. They are close to starvation. There is no crop to cultivate and sell, they have taken on loans, and they have had to migrate to hunt for a living." For farm labourers like Vijaya, even searching for work requires travel. "We have to go to Kamthi, Koroli, Kural, Shirapur, Takli for whatever farm work is available," she said. The circle of possible work grows wider; the returns remain thin. Pandurang is direct about what will remain if nothing changes: "Those who own agricultural land will stay. The landless will leave. The entire village is likely to become empty."  This story was produced as a part of 101Reporters Climate Change Reporting Grant. Cover Image - Vijaya Raserao (in the blue sari) and other women of Shingoli village wait for their week’s wages at farmer Nakusa Tukaram Khade’s home (Photo - Shatakshi Gawade, 101Reporters)