TEHRAN - The unprecedented monsoon floods that wreaked havoc in the southern Indian state of Kerala beginning July this year caused more internal displacement than any other disaster around the world in 2018, according to a report.

The devastating deluge, worst in more than a century, left nearly 500 dead and around 1.5 million displaced. According to Geneva-based non-profit Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre’s (IDMC) half-yearly report, India is highly exposed to a range of natural hazards, which was proved by Kerela floods.

In 2017, India had recorded the seventh-highest levels of internal displacement associated with both conflict and disasters. By June this year, the country was already at the sixth spot, with 539,000 displacements—a number that has more than doubled since then, a report in Quartz said.

However, since the report covers only the first six months of 2018, it does not account for the major flood damage in Kerala, Karnataka, and Nagaland since July.

“India is highly exposed to a range of natural hazards…These physical factors, combined with the country’s high population density, poverty, rapid urbanisation, and environmental degradation, make India most at risk of disaster-related displacement in all of south Asia,” Alexandra Bilak, director of IDMC, was quoted saying by Quartz.  

In the first half of this year, India also ranked among the top 10 countries for internal displacement due to conflict and violence, alongside insurgency-prone, low-income African countries and the war-ravaged nations of Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen.