Distant policymakers worsen Assam’s annual struggle to keep its nose above water

It was six in the evening of July 1 when the water from the overflowing Brahmaputra started spilling over to Manguwa Bil Pathar village in Assam’s Kamrup Rural district.

The 150 families residing in the village were not new to such occurrences, having lived on the sand bars of Brahmaputra (locally called chars) for generations. They knew exactly what was going to strike them and how soon.

“We were not caught off guard though the river started overflowing suddenly. Within no time, we huddle together our families on boats, which are available in most households in the village. By the time we got into the boats, our houses were already submerged. No one would have survived if we had delayed our escape by even a few minutes,” recalled Mehar Ali, a resident of the village.

Since then, Ali has been residing with his wife and four children in a makeshift plastic tent put up on an embankment along the banks of the raging river, not very far from his village.

The water will recede in the course of time. That is when Ali and his fellow villagers will go back to what was once their village to start anew.

Annual agony

This is the life cycle many across Assam go through periodically as, almost every year, the mighty Brahmaputra, the Barak and their tributaries engulf huge swathes of agricultural and residential land.

Assam has a flood-prone area of 31.05 lakh hectares out of its total area of 78.52 lakh hectares, according to a Rashtriya Barh Ayog (RBA) data.

The flood-prone area of the country as a whole is about 10.2 per cent of its total area, whereas in Assam, it is 39.58 per cent, the RBA says, underscoring the vulnerability of the state to deluge.

The current wave of floods since May has inundated over 2,800 villages across 29 districts, killing at least 56 persons and displacing more than 16.25 lakh people, according to the Assam government’s flood bulletin. Over 42,476.18 hectares of crop areas have been damaged.

Resigned to fate

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma almost resigned to fate by attributing the calamity to geographical factors, beyond the state’s control.

Heavy rainfall in China, Bhutan, and in the upper reaches of Arunachal Pradesh led to floods and this is “beyond our control”, he reportedly said.

True, Assam’s bowl-like topography, being surrounded by hills, makes it susceptible to floods. But at the same time, it cannot be an excuse for failing to prevent periodic loss of human lives and alleviate the sufferings of people.

Walling off the pain

Building embankments as a flood-control measure was introduced in Assam in the early 1950s and, since then, successive governments have primarily relied on these to contain the fury of the raging waters.

This strategy of putting up large walls along the river banks to control the flow of water has miserably failed as the rivers frequently change course, making it impossible to tame them.

Breach of embankments in several places aggravated the current flood situation, alleged the influential All Assam Students’ Union (AASU).

Breach of major embankments like the one in Hatimara on Kolong river is one of the biggest factors leading to floods in various places, claimed AASU leader Mriganka Shekhar Bharali.

Brahmaputra in ponds!

“Embankments are not the solution. They are the problem. Due to such arbitrary attempts to restrict the natural flow of rivers, new areas are now getting flooded. This time even Kaliabor, which was not a traditional flood-prone area, has been flooded,” pointed out Kamal Kumar Tanti, Director, Centre for Environment and Climate Action Fund, Assam.

Policymakers’ failure to identify the solution to the problem was once again amplified when Union Home Minister Amit Shah recently suggested the construction of at least 50 large ponds to divert the Brahmaputra water. He was chairing a high-level meeting in New Delhi to review the flood situation in the North East.

“It is impossible to divert the water of a mighty river like Brahmaputra into ponds,” Tanti pointed out.

He perhaps was not briefed properly about the nature of the flood ravaging the region, an official said.

Plans galore, nothing on ground

A multi-pronged river-basin management plan emphasising on traditional ways of living should be worked out to mitigate the problem, Tanti pointed out.

During the UPA regime, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had proposed the formation of North East Water Resources Authority (Newra) modelled on the lines of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the US to function as a holistic river basin management institution with active cooperation of all the states of the region. But it could not take off due to lack of consensus among the states.

The Narendra Modi-led NDA government in 2019 came out with the proposal to set up North East Water Management Authority (Newma), touted as the “first such endeavour to find a permanent solution” to Assam’s perennial flood problem.

However, even five years after its conceptualisation, the draft Bill for the establishment of the authority is still pending clearance with the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), a senior official of the Assam Water Resources department said.

A waiting draft Bill

According to the proposal, the authority is to facilitate the country’s bid to establish prior user rights on water from the rivers originating in China.

The Bill was prepared by the Ministry of Law & Justice based on the recommendation of a high-power committee.

“The bill is ready. It will be cleared by the PMO, soon after which it will be tabled in the Union Cabinet and subsequently in the Parliament,” said Abhay Kumar, general manager, Brahmaputra Board, Guwahati.

“I hope this bill is introduced in the Parliament in the next session. Water being a state subject, a lot of discussion is needed with multiple stakeholders,” Kumar said.

It is supposed to be the apex authority for developing all projects related to hydropower, agriculture, biodiversity conservation, flood control, inland water transport, forestry, fishery, and eco-tourism in Assam and the North East.

What the Bill proposes

Sources privy to the draft Bill said it proposes to include the management of the Brahmaputra and Barak River Basin as a single system as a common-pool community resource held by all the basin states.

It is further suggested that basin states shall in their respective territories develop, manage and regulate the waters of an inter-state river basin equitably and sustainably, provided that the determination of optimum utilization of waters and adequate river flows shall be as per the river basin master plan.

The authority will have two-tier arrangements comprising a governing council under the chairmanship of Union Minister of Jal Shakti and co-chairmanship of Vice-Chairman, NITI Aayog and an Executive Board under the chairmanship of Chief Executive Officer of the authority.

The proposed authority will oversee the integrated management of water resources for the entire North East region and the Brahmaputra basin of West Bengal (Cooch Behar and Jalpaiguri districts).

The optimistic view

Bhaskar Sarma, chief engineer of the Water Resource Department in Assam, emphasized the potential of the authority to offer holistic solutions to water-related challenges in Assam and the North East through improved coordination between the states and the Centre.

Sarma highlighted the region’s critical situation of fluctuating water availability, with either too much or too little water at different times of the year.

Stressing on the need for sharing hydrological data among states during the monsoon season to better prepare for floods and other water-related disasters, he expressed optimism that the authority would provide a new direction towards water resource management in the North East.

Need to stick to basics

Such optimism is, however, not shared by all, as many such tall government promises in the past have come to a naught.

“It is not easy to get all the states on the same page for a joint water-management plan as was the case with Manmohan Singh’s proposal,” an official of the Brahmaputra Board pointed out.

Ecologists like Tanti say instead of waiting for the implementation of some lofty ideas, the Centre and the state should immediately focus on the restoration of wastelands and building flood-resilient houses like the traditional houses of the Mising community, typically constructed on plinths to deal with floods.