SDRF man Gets adoption Calls for 13-month-old girl saved from Kishtwar rubble, but child reunited with family
CHASOTI: A long beard, a navy-blue cap, a megaphone, and a child in his lap. That was how the world met Shahnawaz, an SDRF member from Doda in J&K. His photo — cradling a 13-month-old girl pulled alive from rubble at Chasoti village in Kishtwar district — has gone viral.
Calls and messages poured in. Strangers wanted to adopt the baby. 'Her parents have been found. She is with them now, but people don't believe me,' Shahnawaz said Sunday. They kept calling.
Flash floods from a cloudburst on Aug 14 tore through Chasoti's hillside stream. Rajai Nalla roared, hurling down boulders, trees, homes. A bridge snapped. People crossing the wooden span were swept away. Pilgrims at campsites and langars for Machail Mata Yatra vanished in a matter of seconds.
At least 61 dead, 116 injured, and about 70 still missing.
Rescue teams dug with excavators. Relatives stood along mud-brown banks, eyes fixed on orange vests. Desperation pushed them dangerously close to the torrent until one voice cut through: 'Step back.'
That was Shahnawaz again, megaphone in hand, sprinting up and down the stream. 'Everyone is desperate. You cannot stop them from rushing to the spot when they hear that a body has been found,' he said, his voice turning hoarse.
On Aug 14 evening, while clearing a shattered home, he spotted a faint movement — a tiny arm under debris. He pulled out the child, cleaned her, and wrapped her in a blanket. Then he asked colleagues to free a woman trapped nearby — the girl's mother, a healthcare worker. Alive. 'When the child began to cry, I was happy,' he said.
Later that night, when phone networks revived, Shahnawaz's photo exploded online. 'I felt proud that people recognised our work.
We gave our 100%. Saving lives brought us happiness.'
The girl was handed back to her father, who had been frantically searching.
Shahnawaz kept moving. The next day, Independence Day, he revived another girl with CPR and mouth-to-mouth. He had seen Kishtwar's worst for six years since he joined SDRF in 2019 — bodies fished from Chenab's icy currents after road crashes in the region's harsh terrain. 'Last winter, after pulling bodies from the freezing river, I felt my blood circulation had stopped,' he said.
His family has always been supportive and proud of his work, despite the dangers. 'They're happy I saved the infant,' he said, smiling. Then he turned serious, patting the megaphone slung by his side: 'It has drained my voice, but it is part of my job.' As dusk fell on Chasoti, Shahnawaz's chilling warning echoed — stay away from the killer stream.
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Debris in Place of a Village: Three Days After Flood, Chisoti Villagers Wait for Relative's Bodies
Jehangir Ali From dawn to dusk, several earth-moving machines and stone excavators struggle to undo the plunder. Chisoti (Kishtwar, J&K): At around 11:40 am on August 14, a group of children were rehearsing for the Independence Day celebrations at their school in Chisoti village of Jammu and Kashmir's Kishtwar district when a strange and dreadful noise filled the air. 'I felt as if a VIP was coming to perform the yatra in a chopper which had crashed,' said Hukum Chand, a teacher at a government-run middle school in Chisoti. Every year in July, this difficult village some 300 kilometres from Srinagar via NH-44 comes to life when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from different states come to undertake a nine-km hike to the temple of Machail Mata, a sacred annual pilgrimage for the Hindus deep in the Himalayas. Chisoti serves as the final basecamp of the pilgrimage which lasts more than three months and brings a lot of festivities and immense economic opportunities for the village's few hundred locals. So far this year, two lakh pilgrims have participated in the arduous journey under the watchful gaze of dozens of security personnel and disaster response officials who had been deployed in the village to facilitate the pilgrimage. Before the yatra started on July 25, a large community kitchen came up in the village square catering to more than 5000 pilgrims every day. Around the kitchen, hundreds of stalls, mostly run by local residents, had sprung up selling food, mementos, cheap bangles, chains, earrings and other items to the pilgrims. 'On the morning of the fateful day,' recalled Joginder Singh, a resident of Chaisoti who recently completed postgraduate degree in botany from a university in Uttarakhand, 'a heavy but brief spell of shower lashed the village'. Soldiers of the Indian army carrying a steel beam to make a bridge over the Bhot tributary in Chisoti village. Photo: Jehangir Ali. Sumit Solanki, an eyewitness and a small time trader from Madhya Pradesh, said that he was hawking miniature deities, toy drums and other mementos to the pilgrims when he saw a 'wall of water, mud and trees' crashing down into the village from the mountain. As the massive column of muddy water concealing uprooted trees and large boulders emerged from the mouth of the narrow Himalayan valley with a lethal force, panic broke out. The village's two temples were among the first structures to face the wrath. 'It was a 50-60 feet high wall. I ran for my life and climbed up the mountain,' said Solanki. The armageddon lasted barely a minute or two. Running for their lives, some pilgrims and local residents recorded the chaos on their smartphones. One video shows the dreadful column tearing the right bank of Bhot, spilling over and sweeping away some residential houses. Tulsi Devi, a housewife, was waiting for her turn at the village watermill with a bag of barley down at the tributary when the incoming wave swallowed her. The bustling Kali Mata temple was swept away, too, along with Bhod Raj, the head priest, who was performing his religious duties. 'Our people have sinned,' said Meena Devi, Raj's daughter, at their rundown home, 'My father had been warning us. This is the curse of Mata Chandi. She has taken away our temples and our deities. It is a bad omen. We should not live here anymore'. A man from the security forces speaking over phone beside the roots of a massive walnut tree that was swept into the village by the flash flood on August 14. Photo: Jehangir Ali. Like Raj, Dina Nath, the head priest of Nag Devta temple, was attending to the devotees of Mata Machail when the tragedy struck. 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On August 17, two days after the tragedy, the army was preparing to set off explosives for disintegrating the massive boulders that have destroyed the village partially. At least two more bodies were pulled out from the debris on August 17 but little seems to have changed about the village's ruined geography. The air in Chisoti is putrid, and with the dead believed to be buried underground, there are fears that the situation could worsen in the coming alleged slow pace of rescue operations has built up anger in the village. 'For the last two days, anyone who comes here is more interested in taking photos. We don't want anything. We only want the dead bodies,' Happy Singh screamed at J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah who visited the village on August 16. In this image released by @CM_JnK via X on Aug. 16, 2025, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah during his visit to Chisoti village after a flash flood triggered by cloudburst, in Kishtwar. Photo: Via PTI. Along with his cousin, Singh has been camping in the village since August 15 and searching for his mother and aunt along with 17 others from their native Bari Brahmna area of Jammu who are among the missing persons. As the dreadful column of muddy water crashed into Chenab river and a shallow stream of sludge replaced it, Chand guided the school children further away from Bhot and hiked up into the forest where they watched hundreds of anguished men, women and children, many of them barefooted, screaming in shock and agony, running for their lives. It was all over in less than two minutes, said Chand. When the worst had passed, the young school teacher returned to the village along with a group of cooks who were working at the community kitchen at the time of the tragedy and had managed to escape in the nick of time. The remains of a residential house on the banks of Bhot whose base was eroded by the flash flood, burying the structure partially into the ground. Photo: Jehangir Ali. The massive column of water that came down the mountain had swept away the under-construction bridge over Bhot. Across the tributary, Chand saw his and his brother's home badly damaged. When he looked down into the tributary, dead bodies were scattered on the riverbank. The injured, covered in mud, were screaming for help. 'Beneath the rubble, I saw a human hand making movements. We dug with our bare hands and retrieved a woman. She took a long gasp when her face became visible. She was lucky to have survived,' Chand said. The young teacher said that the rescue workers took an hour or so to build a river crossing using logs and planks of wood. Having finally made it across the tributary, Chand started searching for his brother, his wife and their daughter beneath the debris but he wasn't so fortunate. The dead bodies were located and recovered from the very home which had protected them all these years. 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