NEW DELHI — A landslide hit a village in western India following torrential rains Wednesday, sweeping away scores of houses and burying nearly 150 people, officials said.
Local commissioner Prabhakar Deshmukh said federal rescue workers were being hampered by continuing rains and poor roads leading to the village of Ambe in Pune district in Maharashtra state, where the landslide buried about 40 houses.
"There are constraints. It's a hilly area and heavy rains are still continuing," Deshmukh told CNN-IBN.
Residents began the work of clearing the debris, he added.
"Reaching the exact space is taking time because there is a lot of damage to the road," Sandeep Rai Rathore, a top official of the federal National Disaster Response Force, told NDTV news channel.
Police and medical teams arrived in the area but had difficulty communicating because of poor telephone and cellphone connectivity, local legislator Dilip Walse Patil told CNN-IBN TV network.
"It is a small village and this happened very suddenly," he added.
Landslides are common in the area during the monsoon season, which runs from June through September.
The Pune district is about 151 kilometers (94 miles) southeast of Mumbai, India's commercial capital. (AP)