Asia Undercovered Round-up: 28 September 2026
It's been six months since our last round-up in March. Thank you for sticking with us through the hiatus. We're back, and there's a lot to catch up on.
We' re also changing our rhythm: Asia Undercovered used to land in your inbox every other Wednesday. Starting with this issue, we're moving to every Monday(Seoul time).
Before we start this issue, one more thing: we're looking for a co-author. The ideal candidate is an Asia-based journalist with at least five years of reporting experience. Like this newsletter itself, the role is volunteer-based. If that's you, or someone you know, get in touch.
Nepal and Assam Reckon With a Flood the World Barely Noticed
Prime Minister Balendra Shah, who has given almost no interviews since taking office, delivered his most sustained public argument yet at the UN General Assembly, proposing a Nepal-India-China "Himalayan Climate Resilience Mechanism" for shared glacial-lake monitoring. One month on, the death toll from the disaster exceeds 8,000, yet only 110 of 1,450 recovered bodies have been identified, and 30,000 survivors remain in shelters.
The same monsoon devastated Upper Assam in July. Residents of Nazira describe a village submerged in 30–45 minutes, disaster helplines that never connected them to a local team, and days spent stranded with an elderly, walker-dependent grandmother, rescued in the end by neighbors with small boats, not the state.
Dunia's take on Myanmar's Rehabilitation Bid
After 14 days reporting from Yangon and Mandalay, Dunia's latest field report traces how coup leader Min Aung Hlaing engineered his own election and presidency while citizens who reject the sham vote live under tightening surveillance. The same recalibration is visible on the world stage: in an unusually candid interview with TIME, Min Aung Hlaing courted Western re-engagement while denying genocide against the Rohingya. Underneath the diplomacy is a resource story — tungsten shipments from Myanmar to China have nearly doubled this year, with Chinese capital funding mines in territory outside the junta's control in exchange for up to 35 percent of production paid to the armed groups that control it — a financing loop that keeps the civil war self-sustaining regardless of who Naypyidaw courts abroad.
India's Fraying Institutions
An Indian Express investigation has found that two of India's three Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, formally objected at least 14 times over the past 10 months to decisions made without their knowledge in the sweeping Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls, which has struck more than 130 million names from the register. Their complaints, over changed voter-registration forms and creeping centralization of the electoral database, describe an unprecedented rupture inside a constitutional body built to act unanimously.
In Manipur, the Naga-Kuki conflict grinds on three years after it began, with hundreds of thousands still barred from the Imphal Valley and forced to fund makeshift roads controlled by armed groups just to travel between hill districts.
Land, Labor and Displacement in Asia
In the Philippines, the US-backed "Pax Silica" semiconductor hub planned for Clark overlaps with land that thousands of Aeta people claim as ancestral territory; police injured at least 27 protesters at a September investors' forum.
Across the border in Thailand, a year-old policy letting refugees from Myanmar legally work outside camp fences has drawn over 6,000 people into factory and farm jobs, though several described conditions, from freezing cold-storage shifts to unfamiliar steel-work, hard enough to send them back to camp within months.
Bangladesh, meanwhile, is pressing the case for a Rohingya endgame. At a UN side event, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman laid out five proposals for repatriation, warning that humanitarian generosity cannot become an excuse for political inaction nine years into hosting 1.2 million refugees.
Angh, the first feature film shot in the Konyak language, won the Platform Prize at Toronto this month — an unusual route toward 2027 Oscar consideration for a film from one of India's smallest states - the Nagaland. Director Theja Rio shot the story of an aging tribal chief and his son on 16mm, deliberately reversing the outsider's gaze that has long defined how Konyak communities are filmed.
Asia Undercovered brings you round-ups and analysis of the news, events, trends and people shaping Asia — curated by journalist Seulki Lee, founder and editor-in-chief of the Asian investigative journalism network Dunia. If you found this round-up useful, consider donating to fuel the next one.
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