India's water resources minister said here Sunday he was satisfied with flood defences along a river that breached its banks last August, displacing millions of people in Nepal and India.

Hundreds of villages were flooded and millions of people lost their homes in southern Nepal and the impoverished northern Indian state of Bihar when the Kosi river broke its banks last August.

India's Water Resources Minister Shri Pawan Kumar Bansal said plugging the breach had been a "gigantic" task and that round-the-clock supervision would be needed to prevent a repeat of the 2008 disaster.

"We found the work to be fully satisfactory, but this work has to be of a continuing nature," he told journalists in Kathmandu after travelling to southern Nepal to inspect the repairs.

At least 60,000 people in Nepal lost their homes in the 2008 floods, but the devastation was far worse in India, where Bansal said around two and a half million people had been affected.

The two neighbours traded blame for the failure of the flood defences in the aftermath of the disaster, with Indian officials saying their efforts to reinforce the barrages were thwarted by Nepal.

Under a 1954 agreement, Nepal allowed India to construct the series of dams and spurs on the Kosi, which flows out of the Himalayas in Nepal down into the Ganges.