India's flood early warning system came under sharp criticism this week after the Central Water Commission's main Flood Forecast website remained inaccessible for over a week at the very start of the 2026 monsoon season, even as flash floods battered parts of the Northeast and extreme rainfall events struck several cities.
The South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP), which first flagged the outage, noted that as of June 11, 2026, the Flood Forecast website had resumed functioning but with slow performance, and that queries emailed to the Director seeking clarifications on the duration, causes of the inaccessibility, alternative arrangements and corrective measures remained unanswered.
According to a CWC presentation at the annual flood preparedness conference on May 2, 2026, the commission operates a network of 1,543 hydrological observation stations and 360 flood forecasting stations, including 201 level forecast and 159 inflow forecast stations, covering 20 river basins across 27 states and Union Territories.
Under CWC's Standard Operating Procedure for flood forecasting, the commission is required to disseminate flood situation updates for the Brahmaputra and Barak basins from May 1, and for all other river basins from June 1 each year, through its main website and social media platforms. (sandrp) The website failure thus occurred precisely when the agency was obligated to be most active.
While CWC continued to share daily flood bulletins and advisories via PDF links on social media, hydrographs from the main Flood Forecast website were posted only twice in May 2026. On June 5, CWC informed through posts on X and Facebook that the website had become inaccessible due to an unspecified technical issue, after which the agency reverted to posting old-fashioned hydrographs without a source link — a practice it had abandoned roughly five years earlier when the website was upgraded.
The outage was not the only lapse detected. On May 26, 2026, the website displayed an incorrect Highest Flood Level for the Doni river in the Krishna basin at Talikot site in Bijapur district, showing a reading attained on that date rather than the correct historical figure dating to October 2020. The error was later corrected by the CWC.
When contacted, Vasantha Kumar V, Director of CWC's Flood Forecast Monitoring Department, stated that the website had suffered a technical glitch and that the concerned team had worked for three days to resolve it. On questions about slow performance and incomplete inflow and outflow data, the Director assured that these problems would be fixed at the earliest.
The breakdown in CWC's systems coincided with a spate of damaging floods. Flash floods in Arunachal Pradesh's Upper Subansiri district on May 22, 2026 caused severe damage, washing away key bridges, destroying houses and farmland and disrupting connectivity. Another devastating flash flood on June 4, triggered by a cloudburst and heavy rainfall, caused widespread destruction in Chayang Tajo, the administrative headquarters of East Kameng district, disrupting essential services, damaging water supply and power infrastructure and cutting off surface communication in several areas. None of these floods were monitored or forecast by CWC on its Flood Forecast website.
The problems extend beyond the main portal. CWC's C-Floods web portal, which functions as an early warning system for flood prediction, currently lists only three rivers — Mahanadi, Tapi and Godavari — for inundation forecasts. A third portal for seven-day advisory flood forecasts was found to be slow and showing outdated forecasts from April 2026, with features like 'forecast hydrograph' and 'other forecast portals' serving no functional purpose. The website of the National Water Informatics Centre, which supports CWC's flood monitoring and forecast work by collecting and organising real-time data from stations, was also found to be non-functional on June 11.
SANDRP said this was not an isolated incident and that it had regularly been highlighting systemic issues in CWC's flood monitoring work, including recurring website failures during critical periods, lack of transparency in data management, inaccurate forecasts and delay in correction of errors.
The network renewed its long-standing suggestion that flood forecasting is too important a function to remain with the CWC given the conflict of interest issues in its functioning, and should be handed over to an independent agency. The simultaneous malfunctioning of multiple platforms, including the NWIC, pointed to serious flaws in the entire information dissemination system.
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