Why it cannot be business as usual for Assam as it rebuilds from floods

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.