A record-breaking heavy rain event occurred over Mumbai, India on July 26, 2005 resulting in 744mm rain in 24-h over Mumbai. We show that the simulation of such heavy rain event is highly sensitive to the model grid spacing, and the choice of physical parameterizations used in the models for representing convection and the land surface. Numerical experiments are designed with three different model grid spacing and convection and land surface schemes. Experiments are also conducted to assess the effect of land use change (current versus potential) to diagnose the impacts of land – atmosphere interactions on the precipitation feedback. Precipitation was reduced substantially in both MM5 and WRF models. Thus, the influence of land use change on the atmospheric dynamics may cause the increasing extreme precipitation events during the Indian monsoon season.