A flood of woes in Assam

Tamuli Gaon, a village in eastern Assam’s Jorhat district, is about 40 kilometres west of neighbouring Sivasagar district’s Bihubar, the epicentre of destruction by one of Assam’s worst localised floods since the 1950s. The gushing waters that submerged much of Sivasagar and adjoining Charaideo districts on July 19–20 lost momentum by the time they reached the periphery of Tamuli Gaon, but inundated the surrounding, low-lying paddy fields, to turn this village of 110 families into an island.The village’s Biju Kumar Sarmah, a teacher nicknamed Gospuli for his obsession with plantation drives to “reclaim what’s lost”, explains why Tamuli Gaon was spared. “The water did not have enough force to cut through the embankments in our area, unlike those a few kilometres to the east, toward Sivasagar district,” he says. He is not sure whether the distance from Bihubar would provide Tamuli Gaon with insurance against a bigger disaster, with at least two more months of rain to go this year. “The floodwaters have less than half the distance to travel from Bihubar to Tamuli Gaon than from Mon to Bihubar,” he says.Mon, the headquarters of Nagaland’s district of the same name, bore the brunt of extremely heavy rainfall that drenched parts of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, and Nagaland from July 18 to 22. The rainfall triggered landslides, killing 11 people in Mon town, and large volumes of water from five major rivers and numerous streams originating in Mon district gushed downstream, carrying earth and debris, to swamp more than 80% of Sivasagar and Charaideo districts.“The water trickled in gently around noon on July 19. It suddenly became a mahapralay (total destruction), and before we could understand what was happening, we were being thrashed about in neck-deep water,” says Shivraj Sharma of Bihubar Nepalikhuti, a village near the Assam-Nagaland border that was home to some 200 families of mostly dairy farmers. Nepalikhuti is close to the Dikhow River and along the axis of the road connecting Mon to Naginimora, a border town in Nagaland that thrives on coal mining and trade. Several stretches of this road were almost erased by the overflowing Dikhow.Sharma and other members of his family clambered atop their tin-roofed house to save themselves, watching helplessly as a few villagers were swept past, flailing their arms to grab anything to anchor them. As the water level kept rising, the Sharma family — drenched from the incessant rainfall and without food for two days — feared meeting a watery grave like their cattle. “Our tethered cows could have survived if we had the time to cut the ropes,” he says. When the floodwaters receded, Bihubar Nepalikhuti was under at least 4 feet of silt with branches of trees, upturned furniture, household appliances, clothes, books, bags, footwear, utensils, mattresses, and bloated carcasses of livestock sticking out from the surface.Silt-smeared refrigerators, television sets, two-wheelers, sofa sets, packaged foods, and other items continue to flank a 19-km road from Bihubar to Simaluguri, where floodwaters caused extensive damage to an arterial railway track, snapping train services between eastern Assam and the rest of the State for almost a fortnight. The road was largely cleared a fortnight later, but most houses and structures on either side continued to be enveloped in debris. Septuagenarian Habibur Rahman recalls a “terrifying sound” as the floodwaters approached their house at Santak Bihubar village, snapping trees and slicing through anything in the way. “I don’t know when we can go back to our house. I no longer have the money and the energy to clear the head-high debris from our house,” he says.The ordeal has been similar or worse for Moromi Bora Bordoloi of Bihubar Siloni Majgaon, Ranjit Gogoi of Charing Gogoi Ali, Pithuram Konwar of Dighalijan, and Jatin Saikia of Bhitoruwal Gaon. “We were just not prepared, maybe because we are not used to such water fury,” Bordoloi, a weaver-homemaker, says.Ca