North-East Floods: Why Are Assam and Arunachal Drowning Before the Monsoon?
“The rains kept pouring all night, without letting off even for a moment. It was the same the next day.” This is how Mina, a resident of Tezpur, Assam, recalled the days and nights of May 30 and 31, when the north-eastern region was battered by relentless rains, triggering floods and massive damage. Places like Sohra (aka Cherrapunji) and Silchar recorded a staggering amount of rainfall—470 and 420 mm, respectively—within a span of 24 hours.
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Triggered by a deep depression over Bangladesh, the rains shattered records, with excess rainfall ranging from 427 per cent of the normalinAssam to a staggering 1,102 per cent of the normal in Mizoram. This was the highest May rainfall in India’s recorded history since 1901.
Punyo Chada, 55, a government schoolteacher and an award-winning conservationist currently serving as the secretary of Ngun Ziro, a non-profit focussed on community-based biodiversity conservation in Ziro Valley, Arunachal Pradesh, said, “In my living memory, this is only the second instance of flooding in Ziro. The last time was when I was in school.”
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By June 2, over 5,15,039 people had been affected in Assam, 12,610 hectares of cropland had been damaged, and 793 animals swept away. Twenty-two of the State’s 35 districts were impacted.
Also Read | India’s climate exodus has begun
In Guwahati, the region’s largest city, floodwaters shut down roads, schools, offices, and markets. Makeshift rafts—from rubber dinghies to plantain bark floats—dotted the submerged streets instead of the usual smoke-belching vehicles. The scenes seemed straight from Flow, Gints Zilbalodis’s animation film about a cat surviving a post-climate-apocalypse deluge that recently made history as the first Latvian film to win the Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards.
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While Assam, especially Guwahati, drew most of the attention, States like Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, and Mizoram were also badly hit. More than 30 people died across the region, including seven from two families in Arunachal Pradesh’s East Kameng district when their vehicle was swept off a mountain road by a landslide on May 30.
In Arunachal Pradesh’s remote Dibang Valley, broken bridges left six villagers, including three children, stranded for nearly a week. A video of the perilous rescue, released by the district’s Public Relations Department, captured the danger. By June 6, nearly 30,000 people were affected in Arunachal Pradesh, with the flooding Sigin river inundating over 80 homes and damaging infrastructure in Daporijo. “Swathes of Ziro valley’s unique terraced farms—where paddy and fish are traditionally cultivated together—were inundated, and the entire fish stock vanished with the floodwaters, causing huge losses to the farmers,” said Chada. The cabbage cultivation of a homestay near his Ziro residence was also wiped out.[RG1] In spite of the floods causing losses running into crores in Ziro, there was little media attention.
After the floods
Bichitra Borah, a farmer from Lakhimpur district, Assam, was trapped in stagnant stormwater when the roads became impassable. Hehad received alerts about heavy rainfall and rivers flowing over the danger level from the district administration in his village of Panigaon. But what caught him unawares was the sudden opening of nine sluice gates of the NEEPCO (North Eastern Electric Power Corporation Limited) dam upstream of the Ranganadi river in the middle of the night. The resultant flood drowned at least 100 villages including his. (Details of how the Ranganadi dam triggered one of the worst floods in Lakhimpur’s history this year is analysed in detail by K.K. Chatradhara, a writer and social researcher from Lakhimpur, in a recent article.)
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The devastation left by a landslide caused by the continuous rains in the Rupnagar area of Guwahati on June 7.
| Photo Credit:
ANI
The waterflow breached the village’s flood defences—embankments reinforced with geotubes—meant to hold the river back. As the water level rose, Borah scrambled to save his two cows and two goats, tying them on higher ground along the embankment. He watched helplessly as the river swallowed three Assam-style houses in a matter of minutes. “The education certificates belonging to me and my son were all washed away. Ebilak kenekua paam ako? (How shall we retrieve them?)” Borah’s voice shook in anxiety as he narrated his ordeal.
Flooding in the mountains
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What is notable is that all this devastation happened before the monsoon arrived in Northeast India. Assam’s flood crisis remains dire, with more than 2.6 lakh people affected, and Lakhimpur, Cachar, and Sribhumi among the worst hit.
In neighbouring Manipur, still scarred by the ongoing conflict, Imphal and Senapati districts are struggling with the floodwaters. “Unlike in Assam, the floods here aren’t annual, but when they come, the small rivers—Kongba, Imphal, and Iril—quickly exceed their carrying capacity,” said Donald Takhell, a researcher with Indigenous Perspectives, Manipur.
Floods in the Brahmaputra plains of Assam and sporadic landslides in the hills and mountains of the north-eastern region are expected during monsoons, but what has changed over the last five years or so is that the floods are no longer restricted tothe plains. They are happening in the mountains too.
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People walk past debris and damaged objects in the aftermath of the rain-triggered floods in the Khurai Heikrumakhong area of Imphal East district, Manipur, on June 5.
| Photo Credit:
PTI
In October 2023, flash floods in Sikkim triggered by a cloudburst destroyed the Teesta III dam and washed away 15 bridges, cutting off key districts and leaving the capital city of Gangtok isolated. In 2022, the Barak river’s embankment breach at Silchar triggered floods that affected 5.4 million people, with over 200 fatalities. The 2024 monsoons across Arunachal claimed several lives, and displaced hundreds. However, the flood story usually ends with the floods for the mainstream media. What happens afterwards hardly receives attention.
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Borah lost Rs.80,000 in his fisheries business and Rs.1-1.5 lakh worth of crops, besides a personal loss of Rs.2.3 lakh. This has been the highest loss in his 32 years of farming. “It’ll take a decade to recover from this shock.”he said, adding that while the Fisheries Department has promised some assistance for recovery, he has heard nothing from the Agriculture Department.
Quick fixes
Takhell from Manipur echoed Borah with regard to the actions taken by the government: “They come up with ad-hoc fixes—like using JCBs to fix broken embankments by excavating soil from the nearest reserved forests, draining stagnant water, or initiating eviction drives near the riverine areas—these do not amount to long-term solutions.”
Manipur was one of the first States in the country to enact a floodplain zoning act following a Central government mandate of 1975. The Manipur Flood Zoning Act, 1978, allows the State government to identify flood zones and regulate development in these areas accordingly. “Despite the act, no proper demarcation has been made. And so, the loss incurred during every flood is increasing,” said Takhell. Tongam Rina, an award-winning journalist with TheArunachal Times, said, “I don’t see anyone doing anything about it. Each year, there’s only more construction—and more destruction.”
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Residents clear the debris left behind by the floods in Imphal East district, Manipur, on June 4.
| Photo Credit:
PTI
While it is easy to lay all the blame at the government’s door, the situation on the ground is more nuanced. Patricia Mukhim, editor of The Shillong Times, offered a sharp reading of the region’s governance failures. “In large parts of the north-east region, particularly in the Sixth Schedule areas, traditional institutions and the associated communities control vast territories and have autonomy over their use and management. The problem is, there’s no clear regulation or enforceable guideline under which these areas are governed. Entire hills are stripped bare for limestone in the Jaintia Hills without environmental clearances, or any roadmap for reclamation,” she said, adding, “The State is left with limited jurisdiction, teeth, and an unwillingness to interfere because the issue of the rights of the indigenes over their lands and resources is a sensitive and political one.” The result is widespread ecological degradation, which adversely affects the most marginal and vulnerable sections of the population.
Longer, fiercer monsoons
As floods grow in frequency and scale across the Eastern Himalaya, a clear temporal shift is discernible—what was once largely confined to July and August now begins as early as April and stretches into September. Climate change is undeniably accelerating these shifts and intensifying extreme weather, but the human costs of these disasters are being magnified by the region’s relentless efforts to control nature through dams, embankments, roads, and unchecked construction.
Borah said, “In Assam’s Lakhimpur, government engineers worsened the crisis when, in a bid to drain floodwaters, they cut through the Aamtola embankment on the southern side, while blocking inlet points from the north.” The result was predictable: “The river’s height naturally rose as silt accumulated on both sides. Some of the trapped water drained out, but most of it remained,” he said.
Indo-Tibetan Border Police personnel trek through tough terrain to deliver food supplies to stranded civilians at Tachor Potu, NH-13, Arunachal Pradesh, on June 2.
| Photo Credit:
@ITBP_official
In Arunachal Pradesh, valleys like Kameng, Dibang, Siang, Subansiri, and Noa-Dihing—all sites of aggressive highway expansion, dam construction, and urban sprawl—have borne the brunt. “Landslides aren’t new, but they are happening far too frequently. Roads are being built heedlessly, often without prior studies or assessments. Many roads, both in rural and urban Arunachal, are unusable during the monsoons because of landslides” said Rina. “Even in Itanagar, the capital, streams are clogged. Particularly along NH 415, many of them have disappeared. They return to reclaim their space every monsoon. Many people have died along these stretches,” she added.
Also Read | Sikkim divests stake in profitable Teesta III project to Greenko amid questions
“We cannot tame nature. To protect ourselves, we must undo the damage we’ve caused,” said Punyo Chada, pointing to the unchecked concrete sprawl and rampant quarrying in places like Ziro Valley’s Kley riverbed as key reasons behind the destruction.
Damming effects
On June 11, news broke that a protective guard wall at the 2,000 MW Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project—India’s largest hydropower dam—has collapsed, just days before its scheduled inauguration. This is the second structural failure at the dam site in three years, both triggered by rising, erratic river flows. It is a stark reminder of how infrastructure designed just a few decades ago is already proving to be inadequate in the face of the growing volatility of nature triggered by climate change.
The recent disasters are sending the unmistakable message that our engineering fixes—conceived for a stable, predictable past—are failing in a climate-disrupted present. Unless future infrastructure is designed keeping in mind the region’s geography and its people, the costs will only keep rising.
Rajkamal Goswami is a Fellow-in-Residence at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology & the Environment. This article is written with inputs from Aatreyee Dhar.
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“The rains kept pouring all night, without letting off even for a moment. It was the same the next day.” This is how Mina, a resident of Tezpur, Assam, recalled the days and nights of May 30 and 31, when the north-eastern region was battered by relentless rains, triggering floods and massive damage. Places like Sohra (aka Cherrapunji) and Silchar recorded a staggering amount of rainfall—470 and 420 mm, respectively—within a span of 24 hours.
Triggered by a deep depression over Bangladesh, the rains shattered records, with excess rainfall ranging from 427 per cent of the normalinAssam to a staggering 1,102 per cent of the normal in Mizoram. This was the highest May rainfall in India’s recorded history since 1901.
Punyo Chada, 55, a government schoolteacher and an award-winning conservationist currently serving as the secretary of Ngun Ziro, a non-profit focussed on community-based biodiversity conservation in Ziro Valley, Arunachal Pradesh, said, “In my living memory, this is only the second instance of flooding in Ziro. The last time was when I was in school.”
By June 2, over 5,15,039 people had been affected in Assam, 12,610 hectares of cropland had been damaged, and 793 animals swept away. Twenty-two of the State’s 35 districts were impacted.
Also Read | India’s climate exodus has begun
In Guwahati, the region’s largest city, floodwaters shut down roads, schools, offices, and markets. Makeshift rafts—from rubber dinghies to plantain bark floats—dotted the submerged streets instead of the usual smoke-belching vehicles. The scenes seemed straight from Flow, Gints Zilbalodis’s animation film about a cat surviving a post-climate-apocalypse deluge that recently made history as the first Latvian film to win the Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards.
While Assam, especially Guwahati, drew most of the attention, States like Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, and Mizoram were also badly hit. More than 30 people died across the region, including seven from two families in Arunachal Pradesh’s East Kameng district when their vehicle was swept off a mountain road by a landslide on May 30.
In Arunachal Pradesh’s remote Dibang Valley, broken bridges left six villagers, including three children, stranded for nearly a week. A video of the perilous rescue, released by the district’s Public Relations Department, captured the danger. By June 6, nearly 30,000 people were affected in Arunachal Pradesh, with the flooding Sigin river inundating over 80 homes and damaging infrastructure in Daporijo. “Swathes of Ziro valley’s unique terraced farms—where paddy and fish are traditionally cultivated together—were inundated, and the entire fish stock vanished with the floodwaters, causing huge losses to the farmers,” said Chada. The cabbage cultivation of a homestay near his Ziro residence was also wiped out.[RG1] In spite of the floods causing losses running into crores in Ziro, there was little media attention.
After the floods
Bichitra Borah, a farmer from Lakhimpur district, Assam, was trapped in stagnant stormwater when the roads became impassable. Hehad received alerts about heavy rainfall and rivers flowing over the danger level from the district administration in his village of Panigaon. But what caught him unawares was the sudden opening of nine sluice gates of the NEEPCO (North Eastern Electric Power Corporation Limited) dam upstream of the Ranganadi river in the middle of the night. The resultant flood drowned at least 100 villages including his. (Details of how the Ranganadi dam triggered one of the worst floods in Lakhimpur’s history this year is analysed in detail by K.K. Chatradhara, a writer and social researcher from Lakhimpur, in a recent article.)
The devastation left by a landslide caused by the continuous rains in the Rupnagar area of Guwahati on June 7.
| Photo Credit:
ANI
The waterflow breached the village’s flood defences—embankments reinforced with geotubes—meant to hold the river back. As the water level rose, Borah scrambled to save his two cows and two goats, tying them on higher ground along the embankment. He watched helplessly as the river swallowed three Assam-style houses in a matter of minutes. “The education certificates belonging to me and my son were all washed away. Ebilak kenekua paam ako? (How shall we retrieve them?)” Borah’s voice shook in anxiety as he narrated his ordeal.
Flooding in the mountains
What is notable is that all this devastation happened before the monsoon arrived in Northeast India. Assam’s flood crisis remains dire, with more than 2.6 lakh people affected, and Lakhimpur, Cachar, and Sribhumi among the worst hit.
In neighbouring Manipur, still scarred by the ongoing conflict, Imphal and Senapati districts are struggling with the floodwaters. “Unlike in Assam, the floods here aren’t annual, but when they come, the small rivers—Kongba, Imphal, and Iril—quickly exceed their carrying capacity,” said Donald Takhell, a researcher with Indigenous Perspectives, Manipur.
Floods in the Brahmaputra plains of Assam and sporadic landslides in the hills and mountains of the north-eastern region are expected during monsoons, but what has changed over the last five years or so is that the floods are no longer restricted tothe plains. They are happening in the mountains too.
People walk past debris and damaged objects in the aftermath of the rain-triggered floods in the Khurai Heikrumakhong area of Imphal East district, Manipur, on June 5.
| Photo Credit:
PTI
In October 2023, flash floods in Sikkim triggered by a cloudburst destroyed the Teesta III dam and washed away 15 bridges, cutting off key districts and leaving the capital city of Gangtok isolated. In 2022, the Barak river’s embankment breach at Silchar triggered floods that affected 5.4 million people, with over 200 fatalities. The 2024 monsoons across Arunachal claimed several lives, and displaced hundreds. However, the flood story usually ends with the floods for the mainstream media. What happens afterwards hardly receives attention.
Borah lost Rs.80,000 in his fisheries business and Rs.1-1.5 lakh worth of crops, besides a personal loss of Rs.2.3 lakh. This has been the highest loss in his 32 years of farming. “It’ll take a decade to recover from this shock.”he said, adding that while the Fisheries Department has promised some assistance for recovery, he has heard nothing from the Agriculture Department.
Quick fixes
Takhell from Manipur echoed Borah with regard to the actions taken by the government: “They come up with ad-hoc fixes—like using JCBs to fix broken embankments by excavating soil from the nearest reserved forests, draining stagnant water, or initiating eviction drives near the riverine areas—these do not amount to long-term solutions.”
Manipur was one of the first States in the country to enact a floodplain zoning act following a Central government mandate of 1975. The Manipur Flood Zoning Act, 1978, allows the State government to identify flood zones and regulate development in these areas accordingly. “Despite the act, no proper demarcation has been made. And so, the loss incurred during every flood is increasing,” said Takhell. Tongam Rina, an award-winning journalist with TheArunachal Times, said, “I don’t see anyone doing anything about it. Each year, there’s only more construction—and more destruction.”
Residents clear the debris left behind by the floods in Imphal East district, Manipur, on June 4.
| Photo Credit:
PTI
While it is easy to lay all the blame at the government’s door, the situation on the ground is more nuanced. Patricia Mukhim, editor of The Shillong Times, offered a sharp reading of the region’s governance failures. “In large parts of the north-east region, particularly in the Sixth Schedule areas, traditional institutions and the associated communities control vast territories and have autonomy over their use and management. The problem is, there’s no clear regulation or enforceable guideline under which these areas are governed. Entire hills are stripped bare for limestone in the Jaintia Hills without environmental clearances, or any roadmap for reclamation,” she said, adding, “The State is left with limited jurisdiction, teeth, and an unwillingness to interfere because the issue of the rights of the indigenes over their lands and resources is a sensitive and political one.” The result is widespread ecological degradation, which adversely affects the most marginal and vulnerable sections of the population.
Longer, fiercer monsoons
As floods grow in frequency and scale across the Eastern Himalaya, a clear temporal shift is discernible—what was once largely confined to July and August now begins as early as April and stretches into September. Climate change is undeniably accelerating these shifts and intensifying extreme weather, but the human costs of these disasters are being magnified by the region’s relentless efforts to control nature through dams, embankments, roads, and unchecked construction.
Borah said, “In Assam’s Lakhimpur, government engineers worsened the crisis when, in a bid to drain floodwaters, they cut through the Aamtola embankment on the southern side, while blocking inlet points from the north.” The result was predictable: “The river’s height naturally rose as silt accumulated on both sides. Some of the trapped water drained out, but most of it remained,” he said.
Indo-Tibetan Border Police personnel trek through tough terrain to deliver food supplies to stranded civilians at Tachor Potu, NH-13, Arunachal Pradesh, on June 2.
| Photo Credit:
@ITBP_official
In Arunachal Pradesh, valleys like Kameng, Dibang, Siang, Subansiri, and Noa-Dihing—all sites of aggressive highway expansion, dam construction, and urban sprawl—have borne the brunt. “Landslides aren’t new, but they are happening far too frequently. Roads are being built heedlessly, often without prior studies or assessments. Many roads, both in rural and urban Arunachal, are unusable during the monsoons because of landslides” said Rina. “Even in Itanagar, the capital, streams are clogged. Particularly along NH 415, many of them have disappeared. They return to reclaim their space every monsoon. Many people have died along these stretches,” she added.
Also Read | Sikkim divests stake in profitable Teesta III project to Greenko amid questions
“We cannot tame nature. To protect ourselves, we must undo the damage we’ve caused,” said Punyo Chada, pointing to the unchecked concrete sprawl and rampant quarrying in places like Ziro Valley’s Kley riverbed as key reasons behind the destruction.
Damming effects
On June 11, news broke that a protective guard wall at the 2,000 MW Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project—India’s largest hydropower dam—has collapsed, just days before its scheduled inauguration. This is the second structural failure at the dam site in three years, both triggered by rising, erratic river flows. It is a stark reminder of how infrastructure designed just a few decades ago is already proving to be inadequate in the face of the growing volatility of nature triggered by climate change.
The recent disasters are sending the unmistakable message that our engineering fixes—conceived for a stable, predictable past—are failing in a climate-disrupted present. Unless future infrastructure is designed keeping in mind the region’s geography and its people, the costs will only keep rising.
Rajkamal Goswami is a Fellow-in-Residence at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology & the Environment. This article is written with inputs from Aatreyee Dhar.
