Bhimabai Ujjan Pawar stands in the slush, as her goats look for leaves. She is a single woman from the Pardhi community, a Scheduled Tribe that has been socially discriminated against. She has never been to school and does not know her age, though people in the village say she must be about 55. Wielding an axe, she moves through a rain-ravaged farm in Warapgaon, a village in Beed district, Maharashtra, hacking at branches so her goats can feed on leaves they cannot reach. She seems indifferent to the thorns.

“This is all I have left now,” she says, calling out to the 15 grazing goats, four of them still young. “I used to sell them and then buy my rations from Kalamb (a village with a marketplace accessed by the hamlets in the region). But I have lost 7 kids and four goats in the floods. I had to just throw them away. What to do?” she says.

Since her childhood, she has never seen such heavy rains, she says. The rains began in July and continued for days, halting in between. While the worst came in September, what aggravated the situation were the concentrated heavy bouts of rain. On September 16, 2025, for example, Beed received 143.7 mm rainfall, making it the highest in the region for that 24-hour period.

“We got over 130% of the total precipitation this monsoon. Beed is otherwise a semi-arid region,” says Beed Collector Vivek Johnson.