The Household-Level Flood Loss Assessment 2024 examines how the floods of September–October 2024 affected households across some of Bihar’s most flood-prone districts. The Assessment supported by Tata Trusts provides a ground-level, evidence-based account of flood losses, vulnerabilities, and lived experiences across diverse geographies and social groups.
The Assessment was conducted by Trusts’ partner, Megh Pyne Abhiyan, which has experience in resilience and adaptability to extreme weather, participatory groundwater management, safe drinking water and sanitation, and field-based action research in eastern India.
Covering 2,290 households across 134 wards in 21 Panchayats in seven districts, the Assessment responds to a critical gap in flood reporting. While official damage estimates capture aggregate losses to land and housing, they often mask the wide variation in how floods are experienced at the household level. This report brings those differences into focus.
First, it situates the floods within the broader context of the 2024 monsoon, which affected 27 of Bihar’s 38 districts and was marked by irregular rainfall, upstream surges, embankment breaches, and drainage congestion. These conditions produced a compound flood event that affected multiple river basins simultaneously, exposing the limitations of conventional flood management approaches that rely primarily on embankments and post-disaster relief.
Second, the Assessment adopts a household-level and typology-based approach to understand flood impacts. Drawing on Megh Pyne Abhiyan’s long-standing work on flood typologies in North Bihar, it recognises that floods are not uniform events. Different flood pathways, durations, and spatial conditions result in distinct patterns of damage, loss, and recovery. By disaggregating data across flood typologies, social groups, and locations, the report moves beyond averages to reflect the realities faced by different communities.
Methodologically, the Assessment combines quantitative and participatory tools. Structured household surveys are complemented by participatory flood mapping, focus group discussions, key informant interviews, GIS-based analysis, and direct field observations. Together, these methods capture not only material losses across housing, land, livelihoods, health, education, food security, and WASH, but also the social and institutional dimensions that shape vulnerability and recovery.
The findings highlight deep social and economic inequities in how flood losses are experienced and managed. While asset-rich households often record higher monetary losses, marginalised households face longer and more precarious recovery pathways, relying on distress-coping strategies that erode future livelihoods. The Assessment also documents the near absence of insurance mechanisms, the central role of informal support systems, and the uneven reach of early warning, relief, and compensation processes.
By bringing granular household data, community knowledge, and spatial analysis together in one place, this report provides a robust evidence base for more equitable flood preparedness, response, recovery, and resilience planning. It offers policymakers, practitioners, donors, and civil society organisations a tool to better align interventions with on-the-ground realities and to design responses that are sensitive to flood typology, vulnerability, and local context.
Floods will remain a recurring feature of Bihar’s landscape. This Assessment seeks to ensure that future responses are informed not only by aggregate damage figures, but by the lived experiences of households who navigate floods year after year.
To know more, read the report Household-level Flood Loss Assessment 2024
