Rain falls in Nagaland, ruin lands in Assam. Can the issue of floods be fixed? | TheBriefWire
Rain falls in Nagaland, ruin lands in Assam. Can the issue of floods be fixed?
Published 12 August 2026 · india
The most unjust thing about the 2026 Assam floods is a matter of geography. The rain that drowned Sivasagar, Charaideo and Jorhat did not fall
The most unjust thing about the 2026 Assam floods is a matter of geography. The rain that drowned Sivasagar, Charaideo and Jorhat did not fall on them. It fell on the hills of Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, on slopes stripped of trees and torn open for coal, stone and roads. The water and the mud gathered speed there, in one set of states, and then arrived as catastrophe in another. The people who paid the price were not, for the most part, the people who cleared the hills. Read Full Story In Part 1, the scientists explained how an intense but not extraordinary monsoon became a disaster: hills that could no longer hold their soil, rivers silted too shallow to carry the flood, and embankments quietly left too low to matter. That was the diagnosis. This is the harder part. Can it be undone? And who, across a border the water simply ignores, is supposed to do it? The scientists who study these rivers believe it can be undone. But their answers range from the hopeful to the deeply uncomfortable. THE HILL CAN BE HEALED Start with the good news, because there is some, and it comes from a man who has proved it on the ground. Professor Arup Kumar Sarma, the hydrologist at IIT Guwahati, does not believe a stripped hillside is a lost cause. His life's work rests on a simple, stubborn idea: that a degraded slope can be nursed back to health, and that when you heal the hill, you calm the river below it. The tool he reaches for has a technical name, Ecological Management Practices, or EMPs. Behind the jargon, the concept is intuitive. EMPs are a bundle of nature-friendly measures, some living and some built, that together slow water down, hold soil in place, and coax rainwater into the ground instead of letting it rush off the surface. "A denuded hill can be reversed back significantly by implementing an optimal combination of Ecological Management Practices, which include various nature-friendly vegetative and structural measures, including rainwater harvesting," Professor Sarma tells India Today Digital. A denuded hill is simply one stripped bare of its plant cover. Rainwater harvesting means capturing rain where it falls so it soaks in or is stored, rather than running away at once. Two ideas underpin why this works. The first is surface runoff, which is rain that fails to soak in and instead races downhill across the ground, gathering soil as it goes. The second is infiltration, which is rain that sinks gently into the earth. Bare, compacted slopes produce a great deal of the first and very little of the second. Healthy, vegetated slopes reverse that balance. Less runoff means less flooding downstream, and more infiltration means more soil stays put, and more groundwater is quietly recharged. A house in Sivasagar ravaged by the floods. (Photo: PTI) Professor Sarma has watched this happen. He points to a pilot project at Garbhanga, near Guwahati, where his concept was put to the test. "The Guwahati Metropolitan Development Authority implemented our concept of EMP in a pilot watershed at Garbhanga, near Game Village, and we could reduce the sediment yield by three times, and the well that did not get water earlier used to get sufficient water, indicating a reduction in surface runoff and an increase in infiltration," he tells India Today Digital. Read what that quietly means. By treating the hillside, they cut the soil washing off it to a third of what it was, and a dead well came back to life, because the rain was now sinking into the ground instead of sluicing off it. The soil conservation department has since applied the same practices in two more Guwahati watersheds. His research on how degraded hill catchments shed water and sediment, and how they can be nursed back to health, has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Water Resources Management and the Journal of Hydrologic Engineering. The proof exists. The problem is scale. "Guwahati has more than 100 degraded watersheds," Professor Sarma says. "For the Northeast, degraded watersheds are releasing more sediment and more water into the valley part." And the causes, he is careful to note, are many. "Degradation can be caused by many things, like mining, road construction and expansion, and urbanisation." He draws one distinction that is easy to miss but matters enormously for a fast-growing region. A city and a bare hillside do not misbehave in the same way. "While urbanisation releases more sediment during the execution period, it releases more water after completion of construction, as paved and concrete surfaces do not allow infiltration and generate more surface run-off," he explains. "Such surfaces, however, do not release sediment, as they make a cover." In other words, a construction site bleeds mud while it is being built, but once it hardens into concrete, it stops shedding soil and instead sheds water, faster and in greater volume, straight into the drains. It is a warning worth heeding as Guwahati and the Northeast's towns spread outward. A CURE THAT PAYS FOR ITSELF But here lies the political knot at the centre of everything. Why would Nagaland or Arunachal Pradesh spend money and forgo mining income to heal hills, when the flood lands in Assam? Professor Sarma's answer is elegant, and it turns the whole problem on its head. Restore the hills, he argues, in a way that pays the people who live on them. "The hilly part is also suffering from landslides. We can restore the hill through EMPs by choosing valuable yet erosion-resisting grasses, brushes, orchids, plantation and so on, so that both states can have a win-win situation," he tells India Today Digital. The point is that the plants which anchor a hillside need not be worthless. Choose species that both grip the soil and carry a market value, and the hill stops sliding while its people start earning.
Rain falls in Nagaland, ruin lands in Assam. Can the issue of floods be fixed?
"Small-scale industries for utilising those plants can be developed even in Assam, and a market link for those products needs to be developed," he says. "Planning must be done with due emphasis on the livelihood of people of both the states." This is the crucial reframing. The hill states are not being asked to sacrifice for their downstream neighbour. They are being offered a different way to make a living from the same land, one that happens to protect Assam as a side effect. Landslides threaten Nagaland and Arunachal too. A stable, income-generating hillside serves everyone who lives on it and everyone who lives below it. THE MUD HAS TO GO SOMEWHERE Even a healed hill will not stop shedding soil entirely. Rivers carry sediment; it is in their nature. So Professor Sarma pairs the long, slow work on the slopes with a blunter piece of engineering at the bottom. "Large sedimentation tanks can be prepared at the foothills, maybe in Assam, with proper arrangement for mechanised sediment desilting, as even after EMP application some sediment will continue to come," he tells India Today Digital. A sedimentation tank is a deliberately built basin where a muddy river is made to slow down and drop its load. When water slows, it can no longer hold heavy particles, so the sand and silt settle to the bottom of the tank instead of settling along the riverbed downstream, where they would otherwise steal the channel's depth. Residents help an elderly woman to safety, a reminder that in a fast-rising flood a timely warning matters as much as any wall. (Photo: Reuters) Mechanised desilting simply means using machines to dig that trapped sediment out, regularly, before the tank fills. And the trapped mud, he suggests, need not be a waste product. "A market link for selling that sediment is probably there even now. Otherwise, it needs to be developed," he says. Sand and silt are exactly what the construction industry craves. Managed well, the very material choking the rivers could be sold rather than dumped, helping pay for its own removal, and easing the pressure that drives illegal sand mining in the first place. On the walls themselves, his position is measured, not absolute. "Embankments, as per need, will have to be strengthened," he says. Not everywhere, but where the need is real. WHY THE VALLEY CANNOT DRAIN To understand why the water sat so long and so deep, you have to turn from the hills to the shape of the land it poured into, and here a third expert enters. Professor Pradeep Borah, Director of the North Eastern Regional Institute of Water and Land Management, NERIWALM, and Professor of Soil and Water Engineering at the Central Agricultural University, Imphal, has spent a career on the meeting point of land and water. He makes a point about the Brahmaputra valley that is too often forgotten. "The gradient of the Brahmaputra valley, including the river Brahmaputra and its tributaries, is very low, which cannot accommodate such heavy discharge from the upper catchments," he tells India Today Digital. Gradient is simply the slope of the land, the steepness that decides how quickly water drains away. The hills are steep, so the water arrives fast and hard. The valley is nearly flat, so it cannot get rid of that water quickly. A flat plain is a slow drain. A resident picks his way across a road cut by fast, silt-heavy water, the muddy current carrying the very sediment that is raising Assam's riverbeds. (Photo: AP) And that slow drain, he says, has been deliberately blocked by human hands. "It is also not deniable that the drainage networks in the valley have been destroyed by ourselves, so much so that it negates all the little hope of quick discharge of the flood to the Brahmaputra once such an amount of water comes in," he tells India Today Digital. This is the other half of the disaster. Water racing down from ruined hills, into a flat valley whose natural escape routes have been choked off. The flood has nowhere to go, so it stays. THE TWO STATES THAT MUST TALK Professor Borah is sharpest on the problem that haunts this entire story: the border the water ignores, but governments do not. He begins by explaining why land and water fall between the cracks in India in the first place. "NERIWALM, like other WALMIs in India, primarily concentrates on irrigation water management, where land is obviously a component," he tells India Today Digital, referring to the Water and Land Management Institutes that train the country's water engineers. "Water resources in the river systems and the allied subjects are primarily dealt with by the Central Water Commission." The work is split across bodies before it even begins. The concept that should hold it all together already exists, he notes. "River basin, or catchment, or watershed management concepts are based on the philosophy of holistic management of land and water," he says. A river basin is the entire territory a river and its tributaries drain, the largest version of the bowl described in Part 1. "The hydrology primarily handles the entire water cycle, which includes land surface characteristics, meteorology, river hydraulics, sea and oceans, as well as groundwater." Hydrology, in short, is the science of water on the move, and it does not recognise the lines between departments. But departments do. "Catchment, watershed or land resources is looked after by one ministry, and the hydrology is looked after by another ministry. Forestry is altogether a different entity," he says, and warns that new departments can harden into what he calls silos, meaning bodies so walled off from one another that they stop sharing information. "Creating departments or ministries may be good for efficient delivery of the services, provided it doesn't create the silos." Then he arrives at the true obstacle, the one written into the constitution.
Land and water are largely state subjects, he explains, while a single river's catchment can sprawl across many states. "Interstate coordination is sometimes difficult. Forget about trans-boundary river systems," he tells India Today Digital. "If upper riparian states are doing some activities impacting the surface water hydrology, including soil erosion, the downstream state or states can do little about it. That is exactly what is happening in India now." Upper riparian simply means the states that sit upstream, nearer the source of the river. What they do to the land, those below must live with. His diagnosis of the deeper cause matches what Part 1 established, and he does not soften it. "Unplanned development, especially in hills where soil consolidation has not yet completed, is bringing all the disasters," he says. Soil consolidation is the slow, natural process by which young, loose earth settles and firms up over time. In these geologically young hills, that process is unfinished, the ground still immature and easily dislodged. "The recent flood in Sibsagar and Charaideo is just the beginning." He agrees, too, that the rain was no ordinary shower, even if it was no cloudburst. "The rainfall in Nagaland, though technically it was not a cloudburst, was unprecedented," he says. "Such heavy downpours are expected due to the climate change phenomenon, more frequently." And he is blunt about what else is coming. A glacial lake outburst flood, or GLOF, where a natural mountain dam of ice and rubble gives way and releases a whole lake in one surge, is, in his words, "another disaster waiting to happen in the Himalayas". "In the last decade, we have already witnessed nearly 15 such disasters in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh," he tells India Today Digital. He is honest about the limits of readiness. "It is also true that in such situations, disaster preparedness is often difficult." Would merging the many departments that govern land, water and forests solve it? He is doubtful that a reshuffle alone is the answer, but he is clear about what would help. "It is definitely difficult to say whether amalgamation of these departments will allow us to address the problems effectively, but coordination of these departments, or inter-ministerial oversight, will definitely help," he says. "Head water hydrology and the hydrology of the flood plains are definitely interconnected, and they should be managed together." Headwater hydrology is the behaviour of water high up where the river is born; the hydrology of the floodplains is how it behaves down in the flat country. Manage them as one system, he argues, or keep failing at both. GIVE THE RIVER ITS ROOM There is an older wisdom in Assam that the age of concrete walls tried to bury, and Professor Borah wants it recovered. He is careful to say this is a broader lesson for the Brahmaputra valley rather than a direct cause of the Sivasagar flood, but it is, in his view, the deeper habit the state must unlearn. For generations, he points out, the people of the Brahmaputra floodplain did not fight the flood; they lived with it. "The people of Assam, living in the floodplain areas of the river Brahmaputra or other tributaries, have been living with the flood for generations. Houses with raised platforms in the riverine areas are a testament to it," he tells India Today Digital. The annual flood was not only a threat but a giver of fertile silt, which is why farming communities were drawn to the valley in the first place. "Fertile soils of the Brahmaputra valley always attracted the agrarian communities from different parts of the world." Then came the embankments, and with them, he argues, a new kind of danger. "In the effort of controlling the rivers, we are creating more problems," he says. "We have closed the natural drainage lines, plugged the river courses in order to save our towns, villages and infrastructure, but at the same time we have also created few water bombs in the Brahmaputra Valley." A water bomb is his phrase for water penned in by human structures until it releases with sudden force, the same violent logic as the landslide dam described in Part 1, only this one is built by us. He reaches for a specific, local wound to make the point. "I have never understood why we have closed the mouth of the river Kollong, which could have been easily controlled with flow-regulatory infrastructure," he says. "Technology for such interventions was always available. We have even altered the socio-economy of the entire Nagaon district by stopping the Kollong." Flow-regulatory infrastructure means gates and sluices that let a river be opened or closed as needed, rather than being sealed off altogether. So what does a smarter approach look like? Not higher walls, but more room and more sponge. His prescription braids traditional sense with modern science. "Restoration of wetlands, the beels, which often work as a flood cushion, clearing the drainage lines, and maintaining a clear floodplain zone free from any infrastructure will definitely help us in managing the floods to a greater extent," he tells India Today Digital. A beel is a natural wetland or lake of the Brahmaputra floodplain, and it works like a sponge, soaking up floodwater and releasing it slowly. Build over enough beels, and you remove the valley's shock absorbers. "Afforestation in the upper catchment will reduce the flow velocity and silt load, and will enable better flood management," he adds, returning the argument, as every expert in this series eventually does, to the wounded hills where it all begins. Afforestation simply means planting trees to cover bare land. THE WALL IS NOT THE WHOLE ANSWER What, then, of the embankments themselves, the earthen walls overtopped up and down Upper Assam? Samiran Deka, Additional Chief Engineer of the Upper Assam Zone at the Water Resources Department, is clear that they are being modernised, though he does not pretend a wall alone can save a district.
When the Jhanji embankment breached in two places, he says, the response was not the old improvisation of bamboo and earth-filled bags that critics often describe. "From the third day after the breaches of the Jhanji embankment, the department started work to close the breaches with the most modern technology of geo-tubes," he tells India Today Digital. "Both the breaches have almost been closed, and there is no further spilling of flood water." A geo-tube is a long, heavy-duty fabric tube pumped full of a sand-and-water slurry and left to harden into a firm, settled core, a far more durable plug than loose earth. The department, Mr Deka says, is now threading this technology through its ageing network. "The department has around 5,000 km of embankment spanning throughout Assam. We are now gradually strengthening the embankments by inserting a core of geo-tubes so that breaches can be minimised," he tells India Today Digital, adding that a vast length of embankment crests, the flat tops of the walls, have been hard-crusted, or given a tough protective surface, to further reduce failures. Stronger walls will help. But a wall does nothing about the rising bed behind it, which is the deeper disease, and nothing about a river that arrives faster than anyone downstream is warned. On that last point, Mr Deka is candid about where his department's job ends. "The department has a 24x7 mechanism to monitor the flood level at the gauge sites and conveys the water levels to the civil authority regularly," he tells India Today Digital. "But the dissemination of the flood early warning is not done by our department. It is done by the ASDMA," the Assam State Disaster Management Authority. The engineers watch the river climb; a separate agency must turn that reading into a warning that reaches a family in time. Between the gauge and the doorstep lies a gap, and a flood finds every gap there is. THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH And here, finally, is the voice that refuses all comfort. Professor Bhupendra Nath Goswami, the eminent climate scientist and former director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, was asked whether the government's promised scientific probe into the mining, the embankments and the rest would fix the problem. His reply cuts against the entire framing. "This is not a solution," he tells India Today Digital. "What is needed is a recognition by the policymakers that the frequency and intensity of such disasters are increasing over northeast India rapidly, as a result of environmental degradation due to both legal and illegal developmental activity. This event is a reminder that the environmental degradation has reached a tipping point. Any further degradation will be catastrophic." For Professor Goswami, healing individual hills and reinforcing individual walls, while worthwhile, treats the symptoms of something larger. The disease, he argues, is a model of development that consumes the very landscape it depends on. "Therefore, the government must not allow any further degradation of the environment," he says. "This is not going to be possible if we keep following the GDP growth model of development. Today, the GDP growth model is not sustainable, as it is energy-hungry, but does not create jobs and increases inequity. That is why, globally, there is a lot of talk about moving towards a de-growth or post-growth model of development." GDP, or gross domestic product, is the standard measure of the total value of everything an economy produces, the number by which nations conventionally keep score. De-growth, or post-growth, is the idea, gaining traction among some economists and environmental thinkers, that the endless pursuit of that number is a poor and even dangerous goal, and that human wellbeing and ecological limits should guide development instead. It is a large, contested argument, and Professor Goswami is not the only voice in it, nor will everyone agree with where he lands. But his warning about these particular hills is precise and hard to dismiss. THE CHOICE So the answer to whether this can be fixed is, cautiously, yes. The hill can be replanted with species that pay their keep. The mud can be trapped in tanks and sold rather than left to choke the rivers. The beels can be restored, and the drainage lines cleared, so the flat valley can breathe again. The walls can be cored with geo-tubes where they are truly needed. The two states, and the many ministries, can be made to coordinate across the border the water crosses so easily. The warning system can be stitched together across its agencies. None of it is mysterious. All of it is known. What none of it survives is more of the same. Every expert in this account, the pragmatic river engineer, the land-and-water veteran, the field official and the uncompromising climate scientist, agrees on the one thing that must stop, which is the continued stripping of the hills that feed these rivers, and the continued strangling of the valley that must drain them. Sivasagar was dry for 25 years, not because it was safe, but because the damage had not yet been finished. Whether it stays dry for the next 25 years depends less on the monsoon, which will do what it has always done, and more on choices being made in the hills above it and the wetlands around it. Heal the bowl and give the river its room, or brace for the water. There is no longer a third option. Ends
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