Bangladesh, Nepal and parts of India have been hit by floods as intermittent heavy rains continue since May 2024. Although an annual occurrence, the floods and associated extreme weather events like cyclones cause widespread death and loss to property in the region, disrupting lives and economic progress in their wake.

Both Nepal and Bangladesh not only share borders with India but also rivers which flow through more than a few countries’s territory in the region, thus affecting multiple nations at a time.

In India’s east and Bangladesh’s west, the Brahmaputra river has been the culprit in the latest bout of floods. India’s North Eastern state of Assam has seen over 2.4mn people displaced and over 66 fatalities.

India’s neighbour Bangladesh too has seen over 2mn people across 64 districts displaced and eight fatalities. India’s Kaziranga National Park has also been severely hit with the rising flood waters threatening both humans and wildlife in the area, the latter also including many rare and under threat of extinction species.

In India’s west meanwhile, the Koshi river which flows through both India and Nepal due to its heightened water levels has especially affected Nepal, in the form of a double whammy calamity of flash floods and landslides. According to reports in Nepali media, the total resultant casualties are believed to be over 41.

Additionally the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast very heavy rains which will affect every major part of India, likely further exacerbating the crises. India’s national capital region(NCR) and New Delhi proper have also been affected by rains since the last week of June 2024.

Urban water logging and infrastructure damage has been a common feature of heavy rains in North India annually too. While the loss of life is relatively uncommon in areas of North India with a non-mountainous terrain, the first few days of heavy rains in New Delhi in the 2024 Monsoon season caused part of the city’s international airport’s parking canopy to collapse resulting in the death of a taxi driver.

The Indian Ocean region to which all of South Asia belongs, is prone to around 7% of the total cyclones generated in the world - in turn floods and storms cause between 60 and 80% of natural disasters in South Asia every year.

While disaster risk management has thus been a top priority for the governments in the region, it is impossible to avoid the economic cost of natural disasters. A May 2021 estimate by the Asian Development Bank(ADB) puts financial losses from weather related calamities in South Asia between 2004 and 2014 to be around $91bn.

India alone suffered over $56bn in financial losses between 2019 and 2023, and the wider South Asia region is likely to have suffered even more losses due to weather related natural disasters according to ADB.