Monsoon floods are recurring hazards in most countries of South-East Asia. In this paper, a wavelet transform-genetic algorithm-neural network model (WAGANN) is proposed for forecasting 1-day-ahead monsoon river flows which are difficult to model as they are characterized by irregularly spaced spiky large events and sustained flows of varying duration. Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is employed for preprocessing the time series and genetic algorithm (GA) for optimizing the initial parameters of an artificial neural network (ANN) prior to the network training. Depending on different inputs, four WAGANN models are developed and evaluated for predicting flows in two Indian Rivers, the Kosi and the Gandak. These rivers are infamous for carrying large flows during monsoon (June to Sept), making the entire North Bihar of India unsafe for habitation or cultivation. When compared, WAGANN models are found to be better than autoregression models (ARs) and GA-optimized ANN models (GANNs) which use original flow time series (OFTS) for inputs, in simulating river flows during monsoon. In addition, WAGANN models predicted relatively reasonable estimates for the extreme flows, showing little bias for underprediction or overprediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]