Deadly floods in Assam have displaced more than 700,000 people, killed more than 100 this year and left thousands in relief camps, while state officials call it the worst flooding in about six decades. The numbers are brutal. So is the silence that came before the water.
Who Pays When the River Rises
Rojo Neog left his house in Assam state on the evening of July 19 to buy candles after heavy rain knocked out electricity. On the ride back, the Dikhow River suddenly rose and the current intensified. The floodwaters swept him away, and his body was found three days later, said his niece Priyakshi Gogoi, who lives nearby. Gogoi said floodwaters around her uncle's village Hulang Katoni rose from knee-deep to neck-deep in about 30 minutes. "There was no warning, nothing," she said. "In the morning we thought it's fine, there is little flooding but it will subside, but we didn't expect it to become so bad."
Krishna Karamkar jumped into floodwaters on July 19 when one of his two sons inadvertently fell into the overflowing Dikhow, a tributary of the Brahmaputra. The 42-year-old saved his son, but he perished. "He pushed our son to safety, but he got swept away by the river," said Sumi Karamkar, his wife. The family lives in Nepalikhuti village, one of the worst affected, with over 1,000 animals washed away and 200 houses destroyed. "I am now staying at my mother's home nearby. I have received some assistance from the government but that's not enough. Our family's future has suddenly become so uncertain," she said.
In Bihubor village, 26-year-old Shravan Kumar said he took his parents to higher ground and returned with relatives and five boats to rescue neighbors. Kumar said people were clinging to trees and rescuers had to break through a home's roof to pull out two children and their parents. "I have grown up in the area and have never seen such severe flooding before," Kumar said in a phone interview.
Warnings That Didn't Reach the Bottom
In Nepalikhuti village, dairy farmer Prakash Sharma said he had finished milking his 24 cows in the morning when people began talking about the Dikhow rising. By 10 a.m., the only road out of the village was submerged. Sharma said he put a ladder against his house and helped his 75-year-old father and 65-year-old mother onto the roof. By about 1:30 p.m., he said, the village was under roughly 9 feet of water. "Some were taking shelter on rooftops, some on trees," Sharma said. "For me, it was not just floods, it was a natural calamity of humongous proportion we had never seen before."
Experts said Assam and other states upstream must move beyond spending millions of dollars on flood-control structures and relief toward better early warnings, scientific mapping of changing risks and restoring the ability of forests, wetlands and floodplains to absorb water. Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the environmental group South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, said, "It's very important to study and understand flood risks better in Assam. Once we understand, we can also forecast well. Then we can prepare well and less people will be affected. India is very good at rescuing people or providing relief after the disaster, but is particularly bad in doing anything significant to reduce the possibilities of such disasters."
India has expanded flood forecasting and early-warning systems, but researchers said forecasting is only useful if information reaches the people at risk, they understand it and have somewhere safe to go. Mirza Zulfiqar Rahman, an independent researcher who has studied the Brahmaputra, said warnings sometimes fail to travel from government offices into communities and are rarely paired with enough drills and preparedness. That gap matters when the water moves faster than the bureaucracy.
What the System Calls Relief
Thousands remain in relief camps even as floodwaters recede, while many residents have begun returning home. The floods submerged farmland and damaged roads and other infrastructure. The state’s answer has leaned hard on embankments, erosion-control structures, flood walls and other engineering, even as experts warn that such infrastructure can create additional risks if natural drainage isn't preserved.
A recent report by World Weather Attribution said the flooding across Assam and neighboring northeastern states was worsened by rapid urbanization, deforestation and local vulnerabilities. The Brahmaputra and its tributaries carry enormous amounts of sediment from the Himalayas, continually reshaping channels, banks and river islands. River experts said this makes seasonal flooding difficult to eliminate, but human changes to the landscape have increased the danger.
Sneha Ganguly of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, a co-author of the WWA report, said research increasingly points to unplanned urbanization, deforestation, degraded wetlands, poor drainage and inadequate flood management as factors that worsen flood risk. Assam has invested heavily in embankments, erosion-control structures, flood walls and other engineering. Experts said such infrastructure remains necessary in some places but can create additional risks if natural drainage isn't preserved.
Emmanuel Raju, director of the Copenhagen Centre for Disaster Research at the University of Copenhagen who also worked on the WWA report, said, "True adaptation requires moving towards living with rivers through wetland restoration and proactive early action before floodwaters strike."
Rahman said flood planning should follow the natural contours of river basins rather than state and international borders. Rainfall, deforestation, mining and other changes upstream can alter how quickly water and sediment reach the Brahmaputra basin. Disaster management, he said, also remains too heavily focused on flooding aftermath, rather than reducing risks beforehand.
Nihal Ranjit, a climate and disaster expert at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, said communities in historically flood-prone areas once structured farming and daily life around seasonal inundation. Climate change is pushing some events beyond what people are accustomed to and able to cope with, causing people to move, he said. "This always existed, but climate change and climate impacts like floods are increasing this movement," said Ranjit.
The story was reported from Guwahati, India, by Sibi Arasu and Wasbir Hussain, and Arasu reported from Bengaluru, India.