With each passing day, the true scale of the catastrophe caused by the floods in Upper Assam becomes clearer. At this moment, the most urgent task is to reach the affected people with essential provisions. The government is carrying out its routine measures, but the public response has been far more striking. People have come forward spontaneously and generously to help the victims. I have met very few who have not contributed something—money, materials or effort—towards flood relief.
Yet the truckloads of relief materials heading to Upper Assam must be properly coordinated in their distribution; that responsibility rests with the administration. The administration must also ensure care for the livestock that have been affected.
After immediate relief comes the harder question of assessing losses and damage. Who will prepare a true account of what has been destroyed? How can it even be prepared? The task is almost impossible.
To understand the floods of Assam, we must look back a little in history. One fact is clear: the great earthquake of 1950 altered the character of Assam’s rivers in many places, particularly by raising the bed of the Brahmaputra. Yet that was also the period when we made our first major mistake—attempting to control floodwaters by constructing embankments along the riverbanks.
A few years later, in the 1970s, then Chief Minister Sarat Chandra Sinha made a significant observation. He said that the people of Assam must learn to live with floods. Many criticised him at the time, but his remark was grounded in careful observation.
Floods have been an annual feature of life in this riverine land from time immemorial. In the past, they deposited a thin layer of silt that enriched the fields, and they replenished ponds, beels and rivers with fish and other aquatic life that sustained people throughout the year. Those floods did not devastate lives the way today’s floods do.
What we have witnessed in recent decades is a relentless expansion of developmental activity across Assam and its neighbouring states. Development is no longer limited to embankments. It now includes river dams and a host of other large projects. High, wide roads and railway lines have reached places where none existed before. We still remember what happened in Haflong only a few years ago. Development in the hills, development in the plains—development everywhere.
When the natural flow of water across the land is blocked by these obstacles, catastrophe is the inevitable result. Under natural conditions, monsoon waters move slowly over tree roots and vegetation. Grassy lands, ponds, beels, streams and rivulets check their force. Some water seeps into the ground; the rest reaches the plains gradually. But when water that has been confined suddenly breaches its barriers and rushes over bare, unprotected soil, the outcome is precisely what we have seen in Upper Assam.
I began this piece with the question of losses and damage. Many families in Upper Assam may take more than a decade to recover their former condition—if recovery is possible at all. We live in the plains. If, in the name of development, we have cut down and dug up the hills, and if we have done the same in the plains—destroying ponds, beels, wetlands and rivers—then whose fate is this, if not our own?
Look at what is happening in Jorabat these days. Leave Jorabat aside: after a moderate shower, almost the entire city of Guwahati comes to a standstill because of waterlogging. This was not the case even twenty years ago.
Nowadays, people flock to the banks of the Brahmaputra in Guwahati to admire its beauty, entranced by the parks and riverside “beautification”. What wonderful development! Just wait and watch. Because the river has been encroached upon in this way, will the Brahmaputra not teach us a lesson one day?
There is little point in wailing and lamenting now. The floods in Upper Assam are the price of this model of development. If we continue on the same path, one day we will be finished. Unless we abandon this approach, we will continue to suffer like this.