Healing trauma within the golden window

As natural disasters rise, there's an urgent case to be made for offering psychological first-aid to affected people within the first 72 hours

- Tanisha Saxena

When the mountain cracked open above Ronti Peak in Chamoli, Uttarakhand one February morning in 2021, sending a roaring torrent of rock, ice, and melted snow down the Dhauliganga valley, it wasn't only hydropower plants that were swept away.

Entire families who had survived the deluge soon discovered another kind of emergency—one that lingered long after the debris had settled. “I remember the sound before anything else,” says Jyoti Dhaundiyal, 40, a schoolteacher from the valley. “It was like the earth was screaming. After that, it was all mud, chaos, and silence.” For weeks, she couldn't sleep. “Everyone talked about the rescue, the losses, the bridges,” she recalls. “No one asked how our minds were holding up. Even today, when it rains, I can feel my nerves tighten in my head.”

India's cycle of floods, cloudbursts and cyclones has become routine—but the invisible harm that follows is rarely treated with the same urgency as roofs and rations. This year, relief agencies and state officials reported tens of thousands of homes destroyed. By mid-2025, one tally put the number of Indians who lost homes to disasters at more than 160,000. In the northeastern states, official situation reports recorded more than 257,000 people in relief shelters during a single emergency window this summer.