Several Assam newspapers have reported that approximately six lakh people across 856 villages in twelve districts of Upper Assam—including Charaideo, Sivasagar, Jorhat, Dibrugarh, and Golaghat—have been affected by floods, and that the district administration is still unable to reach about eighty thousand flood victims. The Chief Minister of Assam himself has helplessly admitted that the administration could not reach 30 percent of the flood-affected areas in the Nazira legislative constituency and 20 percent in the Sivasagar constituency. The government has simply been unable to reach these people.
Although the floodwaters have receded, no one has been able to go there because of the layers of sand and silt covering the roads. These people remain cut off from communication. Given this admission by the Chief Minister, and especially given the unprecedented, catastrophic floods in Charaideo and Sivasagar districts, this article raises a few questions. At a time when floodwaters rushing down from the state of Nagaland have devastated the homes, agricultural fields, and livelihoods of lakhs of people in regions that are among the primary habitations of the indigenous people of Assam, these questions feel extremely urgent to the collective existence of the Assamese people.
A Disaster Authority’s Inaction
We met an elderly woman in Guwahati who had been trapped in her own waterlogged home in the Rajapul area of Nazira for several days and had barely managed to save her life. The woman, who has familial ties to this writer, shared that although floodwaters had touched the roads of their village by evening, they could not even imagine the water rising any higher. Having never faced floodwaters before, and never having learned to coexist with floods, she said that while she was cooking the evening meal, water entered the house so rapidly that, in the blink of an eye, the level inside rose to three or four feet.
Spending her retirement years in a neatly built home, she said: “We got no chance to save our household goods, clothes, ornaments, or money. We took shelter in the granary and somehow survived without drowning. Mud and silt buried the entire house, courtyard, and flower garden. How are we going to rebuild our house at this age?” Just as it destroyed her home, the mud and water destroyed the homes, fields, granaries, and livestock—cattle, goats, pigs, and poultry—of thousands of others. How are these people going to start their lives anew?
This is the context for our first question. On July 20, an article titled “Climate Change: Nine Dead, Five Injured in Landslide Triggered by Extreme Weather in Nagaland, Say Officials” was published in Down To Earth. It reported that Mon district received 137 mm of rainfall—compared with an average daily rainfall of just 23 to 25 mm in Assam during July. The question is this: if such a massive volume of rain was falling continuously for days in the bordering Mon district, why were the Disaster Management Authorities of Sivasagar and Charaideo districts, in particular, not on alert?
Do these district administrations, or the State Disaster Management Authority, possess any technological system capable of forecasting how much the rivers flowing down from Nagaland would rise as a result of such rainfall, and how fast that flood would travel? In many countries, the most crucial task of disaster management is to warn people of an impending disaster in time to save their lives. There are numerous examples worldwide of authorities swiftly evacuating people to safety ahead of such calamities. If the district in Nagaland was receiving five to six times more continuous rainfall than Assam, why did Assam’s disaster management authorities have no such information at all?
In today’s era of information technology, did these district authorities really have no advance warning of the coming flood? Who will bear moral responsibility for the fact that lakhs of people lost their homes, livelihoods, and property because they received no warning from the administration? Did hundreds of people die—no one yet has an accurate count—solely because of the inefficiency, incompetence, and lack of technological coordination among the State and District Disaster Management Authorities? Will the head of the state take moral responsibility for the hundreds of citizens who lost their lives because of a government authority’s negligence?
This question matters because the Government of Assam has repeatedly boasted of making the state’s disaster management highly efficient and technologically capable. Ahead of the 2016 Assam Legislative Assembly elections, the Assam State Committee of the Bharatiya Janata Party published the Assam Vision Document 2016–25, which made the following promises on flood and erosion control:
i) Identifying Majuli as a high-priority zone under a special programme to prevent further soil erosion. ii) Dredging the bed of the Brahmaputra from Sadiya to Dhubri, so that the problem of siltation would be identified and addressed at its root. iii) Constituting a Barak Board along the lines of the Brahmaputra Board. iv) Reviewing the Brahmaputra Board. v) Implementing a special scheme to promote erosion-preventing plantations, such as bamboo and mangrove, along riverbanks under MGNREGA. vi) Protecting the livelihoods of inhabitants in flood-affected areas. vii) Introducing a state-sponsored insurance and rehabilitation scheme for flood and erosion victims. viii) Updating and upgrading the state disaster management system. ix) Reviving the River Research Institute to formulate implementable, scalable long-, medium-, and short-term solutions.
In the party’s 2021 Sankalp Patra (manifesto), under the heading “Flood-Free Assam,” the promises included, briefly:
(a) Sanctioning an additional Rs 100 crore to a central committee studying the flow patterns of the Brahmaputra, its tributaries, and other rivers, given how critical it is to understand the causes of flooding and erosion in the state. (b) Strengthening the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) with high-tech drones to monitor the Brahmaputra, its tributaries, and other rivers. (c) Using advanced satellite imagery to identify sites for large reservoirs to store the Brahmaputra’s excess water, and converting these reservoirs into tourism centres. (d) Launching a special campaign to evict illegal encroachers along the Brahmaputra and its tributaries, with newly formed char lands surveyed to prevent encroachment. (e) Initiating dredging work from Sadiya to Dhubri to address silt deposition in the Brahmaputra and increase its water flow.
The shameful truth is that the previous Sonowal government did not fulfil a single one of these promises to solve the state’s flood problem. The government, which spent Rs 36 crore of public money on events like Namami Brahmaputra and Namami Barak, failed completely to prevent the erosion of Majuli. Above all, the promise to dredge the Brahmaputra—made without any scientific study—proved to be an empty one. Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, in the presence of Chief Minister Sonowal, announced the dredging of the Brahmaputra and an “Express Highway” along both banks of the river on October 24, 2016, promising to invest Rs 1 lakh crore in Assam.
That promise remained just a promise. During the Sonowal government’s tenure, no steps were taken to dredge the river. On September 2, 2020, Water Resources Minister Keshab Mahanta admitted in the Assembly that the government had not purchased a single dredger for the purpose. Likewise, neither the central nor the state government conducted any scientific research into the source of the silt or its solution. Notably, on February 26, 2021, Minister Gadkari clarified that the Central Government had no proposal at all to dredge the Brahmaputra or build highways along its banks.
In response to a letter from the Government of Assam, the 15th Finance Commission recommended recognising river erosion as a natural disaster and advised that affected people be properly compensated and rehabilitated, with such support drawn from the State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF) and the National Disaster Response Fund (NDRF). The irony is that despite suffering flood disasters every year, Assam did not receive a single rupee from the National Disaster Response Fund between 2012 and 2020. Consider one example of how little the BJP government—having promised a flood-free Assam—actually attends to this chronic problem. In the 2024 floods, total damage in Assam came to Rs 534.45 crore. Although Himanta Biswa Sarma’s “double-engine” government repeatedly wrote to the Centre seeking relief, the Narendra Modi government provided only Rs 29.02 crore in compensation for the 2024–25 fiscal year. That same year, the Centre gave Rs 3,528.45 crore to Karnataka after cyclone damage, Rs 360 crore to Tamil Nadu, Rs 186 crore to Tripura, Rs 181 crore to Nagaland, and Rs 172 crore to Uttar Pradesh.
In the 2021–22 budget—the first presented by the Finance Minister of the Himanta Biswa Sarma cabinet—several promises were made on flood management under the heading “Revenue and Disaster Management Department.” The Minister told the Assembly:
“Sir, our government has been progressively investing resources in strengthening the disaster management mechanism through measures such as: (i) investment in flood risk management using remote sensing technology; (ii) a severe weather alerting system; (iii) strengthening emergency operation centres and constituting circle-level quick response teams at the revenue circle level.”
Consider, too, what the government claimed to have done under the heading “Revenue and Disaster Management Department: Security of Life, Protection of Land” in the 2025–26 budget speech:
“364) Disaster management is also a priority. ASDMA is working on community training, mock drills, and programmes for vulnerable groups. The District Disaster Rescue Force (DDRF) and Circle Quick Response Teams (CQRT) are being strengthened, and new tech platforms like DRIMS and IDS-DRR are being used for better response. 365) To deal with climate challenges, the Assam Integrated River Basin Management Programme (AIRBMP) has been launched.”
If the Government of Assam is deploying so much technology in disaster management, and has formed rapid response teams in every circle, why did the people of Sivasagar and Charaideo receive no severe weather forecast? Will the Chief Minister, as head of the Assam government, take moral responsibility for this failure or not?
Fear of the Death Toll
The most sensitive question is this: how many people have actually died in this massive deluge? Have far more lives been lost than we currently know? Are people still dying even now, for want of food, water, or evacuation to safety? Are countless bodies still buried under the sand? Has the most terrifying and fatal disaster in the history of Assam—perhaps in the country—actually unfolded in Upper Assam, stripping away everything from the people who keep Assamese society and culture alive?
Probable Causes of the Deluge
Chief Minister Dr. Himanta Biswa Sarma has described a “cloudburst” in Nagaland’s Mon district as one of the primary causes of the floods, but the Kohima and Guwahati centres of the India Meteorological Department have clarified that no cloudburst, in the technical sense, occurred in Nagaland. According to some experts, more than heavy rainfall alone is at play—river management, infrastructure, and environmental degradation may all have contributed to this disaster. Local residents and environmentalists say illegal sand and stone extraction has long continued along stretches of the Dikhow river in both Nagaland and Assam. Given the unprecedented layers of silt and sand deposited in homes and fields, many fear that a huge quantity of sand and soil washed down from the hills along with the water. Will the Government of Assam have the moral courage to order a proper scientific investigation into this?
Need for Special Package for Reconstruction, Rehabilitation, and Resettlement
Finally, how will the government restore the livelihoods of those whose homes, fields, crops, ponds, livestock, shops, and markets were entirely destroyed in this deluge? The routine relief offered by the Assam State Disaster Management Department will be of only minimal help to these people. If hundreds of lives were lost, and livelihoods and property destroyed, because of the negligence, incompetence, and apathy of the Disaster Management Department, why should the Government of Assam not pay adequate compensation?
The government must provide sufficient financial aid to rebuild every house destroyed in this deluge, restore agricultural fields buried under sand and mud, help restart shops, fisheries, and animal husbandry, and clear villages and towns of the blanket of sand and mud that now covers them. If Karnataka could receive Rs 3,528.45 crore from the National Disaster Response Fund after cyclone damage in 2024–25, and if the Government of India approved Rs 7,346 crore for the reconstruction of Uttarakhand after the catastrophic 2013 floods—called the most destructive flood in post-independence India, in which over 5,700 people died—why can the Government of Assam not demand a substantial financial package from the Centre for this massive deluge in Upper Assam?
The scale of that compensation will also tell us how genuinely concerned the Centre is for the plight of Assam and the livelihoods of its indigenous people. And if the Government of India, true to past form, offers only meagre compensation, will the Government of Assam have the courage to independently borrow a large sum for the reconstruction, rehabilitation, and resettlement of villages and towns in districts like Sivasagar, Charaideo, and Jorhat—just as it borrows thousands of crores for other purposes?