Rescuers searching a Himalayan river for dozens of Indian students, who were swept away when a dam released a rush of water, have retrieved four bodies.

The 25 students from the southern city of Hyderabad had been taking photographs on the banks of the Beas River on Sunday when they were engulfed by the water from the Larji hydropower station near the mountain resort town of Manali in Himachal Pradesh.

They had been on a 10-day field trip with around 48 students, some of whom managed to scramble to safety.

Police in Manali said four bodies were recovered Monday morning after the search resumed at dawn. They said a shortage of boats and divers was hampering the operation.

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Lightning strikes killed 32 people, including nine children, during storms at the weekend in India.

It is not rare for lightning to strike someone when it is monsoon season, but that the sheer number of the death toll is extremely rare.

The strikes killed people in the eastern Indian states of Bihar and Jharkhand.

Torrential rains accompanied by strong winds uprooted trees, damaged houses and brought down power cables across the region on Sunday night.

Villagers housed in bamboo-and-grass huts are generally most at risk.

At least nine people were killed and 15 others injured when a hotel building collapsed in southern India Monday, police said.

The three-storey building was located in Secunderabad, a city in Andhra Pradesh state, senior police official Anjani Kumar told CNN.

Rescue operations are ongoing at the scene, he said. The cause of the collapse would be investigated once the rescue phase was over, he added.

According to Municipal Commissioner M.T. Krishna Babu, 19 people have so far been pulled from under the rubble.

At least two people were still believed to be trapped, he said. “We are trying to pull them out.”

At least seven people have been killed after a a four-storey building in Mumbai collapsed in heavy monsoon rains.

Rescuers used sensors and life detectors to search for five other people who were feared trapped in the debris of the building in the Sion area of Mumbai.

Nearby residents said structural alterations made to the ground floor caused the collapse, the Times of India reported.

Building collapses are common in India as builders try to cut corners by using substandard materials, and as multistory structures are built with inadequate supervision.

The massive demand for housing around India’s cities and pervasive corruption often result in builders adding unauthorized floors or putting up illegal buildings.

Scientists unveiled Tuesday an affordable vaccine against a deadly diarrhoea-causing virus that kills some 100,000 children in India every year.
Rotavirus, which causes dehydration and severe diarrhoea, is globally responsible for some 453,000 deaths annually and is particularly threatening in Africa and Asia, where access to urgent healthcare is often out of reach.
K. Vijaraghavan, secretary of India’s Department of Biotechnology which steered the hunt for an affordable rotavirus vaccine, said it was a product of international cooperation, although it has yet to be approved by New Delhi.
The vaccine named Rotavac will be manufactured by Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech pharmaceutical firm which has said it has the capacity to mass produce 60 million doses after clearance is given. Each vaccination consists of three doses.
Rotavirus is blamed for causing up to 884,000 hospitalisations in India a year, at a cost to the country of 3.4 billion rupees ($72 million), scientists say.

Two people were killed and 16 injured when the ceiling of a hospital in central India came crashing down, trapping patients and employees under the rubble, officials said.