Dehradun: At least 18 children were buried alive when the building of a school caved in following incessant rain in Uttarakhand`s Kapkot town Wednesday, an official said.

Classes were going at the Saraswati Shishu Mandir school in Kapkot, in Bageshwar district in the Himalayan state, when the tragedy occurred.

"There were 24 children in the classroom which collapsed," a senior official told IANS over the phone from Bageshwar.

"The remaining six children were saved."

The school building, he added, was old and could not withstand the onslaught of a cloudburst that also triggered landslides at some neighbouring areas.

"Rescue teams were already on the job and had managed to extricate all the bodies from the debris," the official said.

Former Uttarakhand chief minister Bhagat Singh Koshiyari, who hails from Kapkot, told IANS: "The damage is quite extensive but nothing could be worse than the death of the poor children, which is an irrepairable loss to their families.

BDST: 1946 HRS, August 18, 2010