At least 81 people have been killed and 46 injured in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh after three days of heavy rainfall triggered widespread flooding, state government officials announced on Monday. More than 1,000 houses were damaged across several districts, schools were closed in parts of the state including the capital Lucknow, and rescue teams worked to move residents from inundated areas to safer ground. Authorities advised people to avoid waterlogged roads and to keep away from fast-flowing rivers and drainage channels.
A senior meteorologist at the Regional Meteorological Centre in Lucknow said rainfall was expected to ease as a weather system over the Bay of Bengal weakened, though light rain was forecast to continue in eastern and western parts of the state through Tuesday. Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state stretching across the Gangetic plains, is regularly exposed to severe monsoon flooding between June and October.
Flooding also struck Odisha, a coastal state on India's eastern seaboard, where more than 75,000 people were evacuated to safer locations. The evacuations come amid what officials describe as repeated and intense downpours battering the region. Meanwhile, in neighbouring Nepal, 21 people died in weather-related incidents between Thursday and Sunday, according to the country's disaster management agency. Five people remained missing and five others were injured, with floods and landslides damaging 194 houses. Nepal is still recovering from catastrophic August floods that killed more than 1,400 people and left nearly 6,000 missing — one of the country's deadliest monsoon seasons in recent memory.
Further south, authorities in Chennai — the capital of Tamil Nadu state on India's southeastern coast — are racing to complete flood mitigation works ahead of the Northeast Monsoon, which typically arrives in October and November. Officials have set an October 15 deadline for civic agencies to finish storm water drain desilting, canal improvement, and drainage network construction projects across Chennai and neighbouring districts including Chengalpattu, Tiruvallur, and Kancheepuram. Works funded at an estimated cost of 100 crore rupees are under way, with desilting completed in more than 1,300 kilometres of the city's 1,683-kilometre drain network so far.
The scale of this season's flooding across South Asia underscores the mounting humanitarian cost of extreme weather in the region. Scientists have long warned that climate change is intensifying monsoon rainfall patterns, making floods more frequent and severe — a trend that stretches emergency response systems and displaces tens of thousands of people each year across India, Nepal, and Bangladesh.