Assam floods: A national calamity

Floods play havoc in Assam every year, but the scale of this year’s devastation calls for a robust and effective flood management strategy

Six more deaths on Wednesday pushed this monsoon’s toll in Assam to 95, with over 1.6 lakh people affected across 563 villages in fourteen districts now on high alert. Embankments have breached in seven places. Nearly 17,000 hectares of cropland lie submerged. Relief camps have opened and the Centre has released emergency funds. All of it is necessary. None of it is new.  That is the real story of Assam’s floods: not that they happen, but that they happen on schedule. Last year the toll stood at 26 dead and 6.3 lakh affected. In 2022, the Brahmaputra submerged 32 of the state’s 35 districts and displaced three million people. Each time, the same script plays out — rescue, relief, condolence, forgetting — until the next monsoon revives it. Some of this is geography. The Brahmaputra carries one of the heaviest silt loads of any river on Earth, steadily raising its own bed and narrowing its capacity to hold water. Assam’s fifty-odd tributaries, fed by intense upstream rain in Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, can turn flash floods into disasters within hours, as Upper Assam districts unused to flooding at this scale discovered this year. But much of it is policy. Assam’s chief flood defence remains nearly 4,800 km of embankments, of which the state’s own water resources minister admits over 60 percent need repair.

Roughly Rs 30,000 crore has been spent on this approach over six decades, and by the water resources department’s own admission, no long-term flood or erosion mitigation measures have ever been implemented — only short-term patchwork, rebuilt and re-breached every year. Wetlands that once absorbed excess water have been encroached upon for construction, including in Guwahati, where poor drainage now produces urban flooding on top of riverine flooding. And India still manages its most consequential upstream relationship, with China, through ad hoc hydrological data-sharing arrangements rather than a binding treaty, leaving early-warning systems partly blind upstream. There are signs of a better direction. Delhi approved Rs 692 crore last October to restore two dozen wetlands across nine districts, explicitly framed as a shift from embankments toward natural flood buffers. Multilateral lenders have committed several hundred million dollars more toward a genuinely integrated, basin-wide approach. These are the right instincts. But they remain add-ons to a system still built around embankment contracts and annual relief cycles, not replacements for it. A real water policy for Assam would make basin-wide planning — flood control, irrigation, wetland restoration, urban drainage — the responsibility of one empowered authority, not scattered departments. It would zone floodplains against construction, fund flood mitigation as permanent infrastructure rather than emergency spending, and give riverine and char-dwelling communities, who have read these rivers for generations, a real seat in planning them. Assam does not lack rainfall warnings or relief funds. It lacks the political will to treat flooding as a governance failure as much as a natural one. Ninety-five deaths later, that is the reform actually due.