A landslide struck Shelarwadi hamlet in Dahivali village, Khed taluka of Ratnagiri district, on Monday night after days of relentless rain, burying homes and trapping three members of one family under debris. A 75-year-old woman, Kalpana Shelar, was rescued, while rescue teams continued searching through Tuesday for two others, Shantaram Shelar and Satish Shelar, according to Nagpur Today and ETV Bharat.

Teams from the National Disaster Response Force, local police and Revenue Department officials, along with residents who acted as first responders, launched the search-and-rescue effort, though officials said loose, waterlogged terrain and continuing rain were slowing the work. Ratnagiri District Guardian Minister Uday Samant visited the site on Tuesday morning and ordered the relocation of families living at the landslide site and in nearby areas that have since been declared unsafe.

Part of a wider pattern

The Khed landslide is not an isolated event. Several parts of Maharashtra have seen days of unrelenting rain, triggering landslides, fallen trees and waterlogging across the Konkan coast and interior districts alike — the same spell of weather that has pushed Pune’s Khadakwasla dam to near-full capacity and forced river alerts this week. Ratnagiri’s hilly, laterite terrain along the Sahyadri foothills is particularly prone to slope failure once soil becomes saturated, and monsoon landslides have recurred in Konkan talukas like Khed, Chiplun and Mahad in recent years, often with the heaviest toll falling on small hamlets built on or below steep slopes.

Separately, forecasters had flagged a possible cloudburst risk over the Nashik-Trimbakeshwar belt this week; officials said that the weather system instead shifted north toward Surat and south toward Akole, sparing the region the worst-case scenario even as rainfall and river levels, including the Godavari, continued to rise. Disaster Management Minister Girish Mahajan inspected affected areas as authorities kept a close watch on the shifting rain bands.

What it means for residents

For families in Ratnagiri’s hill hamlets, and in similarly exposed villages elsewhere in the Konkan, the Khed landslide is a reminder that this monsoon is running unusually intense even by the region’s standards, and that living below steep, saturated slopes carries a real and recurring risk once rainfall crosses a threshold. The guardian minister’s order to relocate at-risk families points to the immediate response, but it also underscores a longer-standing gap: many Konkan hill settlements still lack systematic slope-stability surveys or early-relocation plans, meaning action typically comes after a slide rather than before one. For residents elsewhere in the state, the episode is a signal to take local disaster-management advisories on rain-soaked slopes and low-lying riverbanks seriously rather than treating them as routine warnings.

What to watch

The immediate priority is the fate of the two people still missing in Khed, and whether rescue teams can safely continue the search as rain persists. Beyond this incident, residents in landslide-prone Konkan talukas and administrators alike will be watching whether the state follows through on relocating other families flagged as being in unsafe zones, and how the shifting monsoon rain bands — which spared Nashik-Trimbakeshwar this week but hit Ratnagiri hard — continue to move across the state in the days ahead.

Sources: Nagpur Today, ETV Bharat

This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.