Opinion Why Assam keeps flooding

Last year in October, after flood waters had receded in Assam, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced 54 projects to mitigate the effects of swelling rivers. These initiatives, he had said, “would bring us close to a flood-free Assam”. The state government, however, is nowhere close to securing people’s lives and properties against the rising and raging waters. This year, according to the Assam State Disaster Management Authority, floods have claimed more than 50 lives and displaced 3,60,000 people. More than 40,000 hectares of crop area have been affected and large parts of Dibrugarh and Guwahati are under water. Now, CM Himanta Biswa Sarma has struck a note of despair — “floods are due to geographical factors beyond the state’s control”, he has said.

Assam’s vulnerability stems from a complex combination of hydrological and climatic factors. The state has more than 120 rivers, several of which originate from the hills and mountains of extreme rainfall hotspots in Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya as well as in China and Bhutan. But it’s also a fact that for nearly 70 years, the Centre and Assam government have not found ways to control the damage caused by rivers in spate. Despite flood after flood exposing the hazards of the embankment-centred approach, the state’s authorities have not course corrected. Most of these flood control structures date back to the 1960s and 1970s, when the hydrology of Assam’s rivers, including the mighty Brahmaputra, was poorly understood. Solutions such as tapping into the knowledge systems of indigenous people to build flood-resistant houses, dredging rivers, arresting erosion or even building more resilient embankments have either remained on paper or haven’t been adequately implemented. In 2021, a parliamentary panel asked the Centre to set up modern weather stations in the upstream catchment of the Northeast’s dams and install sirens to alert people downstream of floods. However, the region continues to lack state-of-the-art warning systems.

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Guwahati is a bowl-shaped lowland, susceptible to water logging. Historically, marshes and water channels worked together to make the city habitable. In the last 70 years, however, construction projects have chipped away at these critical ecological features. Like in most Indian cities, Guwahati’s drainage system is in disrepair. Rainwater from neighbouring Meghalaya and the surrounding hills causes flash floods. For at least a decade now, it’s been evident that governments in the Northeast — and the Centre — need to put their heads together to mitigate flood-related damages. The people of Assam, and the Northeast, deserve governance solutions, instead of an administration that blames floods on geography.