India: Bihar Pays Rs 112 Crore in Flood Relief to Nearly 2.5 Lakh Farmers
19 October 2026, Patna: Bihar’s state government has transferred Rs 112.52 crore directly into the bank accounts of 2,48,704 farmers whose crops and farmland were damaged in this year’s floods, in one of the larger tranches of disaster relief released so far this season.
Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary announced the transfer on October 14 under the state’s Agriculture Input Grant Scheme, which compensates farmers for the cost of seeds, fertiliser and other inputs lost when standing crops are destroyed. The payment was made through Direct Benefit Transfer, sending money straight into farmers’ bank accounts rather than through intermediaries, a mechanism the state has increasingly relied on in recent disaster responses to speed up disbursal.
The compensation addresses damage caused by heavy rainfall and sudden rises in several of Bihar’s major rivers in late August, which triggered widespread flooding across the state’s northern and central plains. According to state disaster management officials, the floods eventually affected roughly 50 lakh people across 15 districts, including Patna, Bhojpur, Saran, Vaishali, Bhagalpur, Begusarai, Buxar, Samastipur, Munger, Katihar, Lakhisarai, Khagaria, Purnea, Madhepura and Arwal, with 576 gram panchayats inundated at the peak of the crisis. The Kosi river crossed the danger mark at Baltara and Kursela, while the Ganga crossed danger levels at Kahalgaon. At the height of the emergency, the state had six relief camps sheltering more than 7,700 displaced people, three community kitchens that together served nearly 1.96 crore meals, and had deployed 27 State Disaster Response Force teams, eight National Disaster Response Force teams and 391 boats for rescue and relief work.
Notably, the flooding occurred in a year when overall monsoon rainfall in Bihar was running below normal, roughly 29 percent below the long-term average for the June-to-September period by late September, according to the state weather office. That underlines a pattern increasingly familiar to disaster managers in the Gangetic plains: destructive flooding can occur even in a season of overall rainfall deficit, when short, intense bursts of rain upstream, combined with releases from barrages on rivers shared with Nepal, overwhelm embankments regardless of the seasonal average.
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Bihar is one of India’s most flood-prone states, with roughly three-quarters of its geographical area in north Bihar considered flood-affected in a typical monsoon, largely because of the Himalayan rivers, including the Kosi, Gandak, Bagmati and Kamla Balan, that flow through it from Nepal. Agriculture input grant payments of this kind have become a near-annual exercise, intended to help farmers afford fresh seed and fertiliser in time for the rabi sowing season that follows the monsoon.
Why this round of relief is being watched
This payment is notable less for its novelty than for its scale and timing. Coming in mid-October, roughly seven weeks after the worst of the flooding, it lands just as farmers in the affected districts need funds to prepare fields for wheat, maize and pulses sowing in the weeks ahead. Delays in such payments in past years have been blamed for pushing farmers into informal credit for input purchases, so a relatively swift disbursal this season, if it holds up as other districts file claims, would mark a modest improvement in the state’s disaster-response machinery.
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