Opinion: Assam's flood-focused disaster system is not built for mountain floods

Assam's disaster planning is still built around slow, Brahmaputra-driven floods in familiar low-lying districts, and it is not ready for the high-speed mountain floods the state has now suffered twice in four years, Mrinal Saikia, assistant professor of economics at Cotton University in Guwahati, argues in a column for Down To Earth. The views are the writer's own.

He describes such floods as combining the speed of a flash flood with the force of a landslide. In May 2022, heavy rain in Dima Hasao set off floods and 5,178 landslides identified by satellite mapping; three people died, nearly 57,000 were displaced and more than 200 homes were destroyed. A 2025 study found residents also lost habitable and cultivable land to subsidence, which they blamed on earlier mining that left loose sand in the ground.

In July 2026 a larger disaster hit Upper Assam. Independent accounts, the writer notes, linked it to deforestation and mining in the hills around Naginimora, unregulated sand and stone extraction from the Dikhow riverbed, and rathole and opencast coal mining in five bordering districts of Nagaland. Sivasagar, Charaideo and Jorhat had their worst inundation in more than six decades; more than 60 people died and about 700,000 were affected, with almost no warning. In both places, he argues, extraction had stripped the hills of the vegetation and soil structure that held them, so ordinary monsoon rain became a disaster.

The column says resources have not followed the risk. A disaster official in Dima Hasao said equipment, funding and training remain flood-focused; the national plan for permanent mountain rescue teams named only Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Sikkim; and the state disaster authority's main purchase in January 2026 was flood-rescue boats.

Saikia calls for state disaster response units trained and equipped for hill terrain and debris flows, mitigation money for slope stabilisation and catchment restoration in the same proportion as for embankments, and for mining, deforestation and unplanned construction upstream to be treated as disaster risks in their own right.

Source: Down To Earth