Disaster research in high-income settings shows that better-resourced communities see population inflows and faster recovery, while disadvantaged communities suffer prolonged population loss. Whether this pattern holds in rapidly urbanizing cities of the Global South remains unclear. Here we show, using mobile phone data from Pune, India, and Bandung, Indonesia, how neighborhood-level changes in phone presence, a proxy for short-term population movement, relate to flooding and neighborhood deprivation. We combine satellite-derived flood maps with phone records to compare flooded and non-flooded areas over the 30 days around each flood. In both cities, less deprived neighborhoods see phone presence rise after flooding, while more deprived neighborhoods see it fall, consistent with resource-seeking interpretations documented in North American and European disaster research. The cities differed, however, in how deprivation relates to flood exposure: in Pune, more deprived flooded neighborhoods showed suggestive evidence of disproportionately larger decreases in detected device presence than similarly deprived non-flooded neighborhoods; no comparable interaction was observed in Bandung. Economic considerations are associated with post-flood device-presence changes in South and Southeast Asian cities in ways that parallel high-income contexts, though local context adds variation.

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