Indore: A village in Madhya Pradesh's Dhar district has begun submerging as the level of the backwater of neighbouring Gujarat's Sardar Sarovar Dam started rising over the past fortnight due to heavy rains. On Sunday, the backwater level rose to 133 metres, 6.5 metres above the danger mark, leaving thousands of trees, large chunk of agricultural land and human settlements in Nisarpur, about 180 kilometres from here, on the brink of going under, an senior official said. A backwater is part of a river in which there is almost no current and gets created after the natural flow of the river is obstructed due to construction of dams as well as natural causes like vegetation.

The village, two centuries old, has a population of around 10,000 and several of them have moist eyes as they see everything that was part of their lives start to fold up as the water level rises unrelentingly. It is located on the banks of the Uri Baghini river and water released from the Sardar Sarovar Dam over the past 20 days had caused the river level to rise continuously, Devendra Kumar Kamdar, a leader of the dam's affected people and president of a local traders union, told PTI. "On Sunday, level of Sardar Sarovar Dam's backwater, located about four kilometres from Nisarpur, reached 133 metres, which is 6.5 metres above the danger mark," an official from Madhya Pradesh government's Narmada Valley Development Authority (NVDA) told PTI.