When the floodwaters rose around their home in Rajapul on July 19, Bandana Buragohain had no way of getting out on her own.

The 70-year-old clung to the back of a man from her village as he waded into the current. At one point, the force of the water pushed him backwards. A couple of other boys came and helped carry her to a nearby house with a terrace, where around 30 others had already taken shelter.

“I somehow managed to stay alive. I could have died,” she recalled.

Rajapul, in the Nazira subdivision of Sivasagar district, was among the areas caught in the path of what several reports have described as one of Assam's worst localised floods since the 1950s. After days of heavy rain across the region, including 137 mm recorded over eight to nine hours in the neighbouring hills of Nagaland, a sudden rush of water moved downstream into the plains on July 19, sending the Dikhow, Disang and Janji, rivers that eventually meet the Brahmaputra, above extreme flood levels within hours and engulfing settlements before families could evacuate. The same rainfall triggered multiple landslides in Nagaland’s Mon district, killing nine people.

The death toll climbed to 100, with more than 2.12 lakh people affected across Sivasagar, Charaideo, Jorhat and Golaghat districts. Livestock losses were extensive, and 17,198 hectares of agricultural land were submerged. Within Sivasagar district, Nepali Khuti in Bihubar emerged as the epicentre of the disaster, with more than 300 families left destitute. Videos from the village showed bodies being recovered from beneath layers of silt.

Weeks on, the water has drained out of most of Sivasagar, but little else has been restored. For families in the affected villages, the livestock is gone, the sowing window has passed, and many still wait for cash assistance.

In Rajapul: ‘No other way of earning’

Bandana lives with her husband, Motiram Buragohain, 72, in a mud house that now bears the marks of the flood. Halfway up the blue mud walls, a brown waterline marks how high the floodwaters rose inside the house. 

The Buragohains have seven daughters. After the waters receded, almost a week later, one of their daughters travelled down from the nearby town where she lives with her husband. She spent hours clearing thick layers of mud and silt from the house and wiping down its blue mud walls with cow dung. But the house is still not fully clean. “It has been a task to clean it. It requires a lot of labour,” Bandana says.

Almost everything inside was destroyed. The kitchen was badly damaged. Whatever little furniture they had was washed away. Only a wooden bed remained, though its mattress was ruined.

Outside, the losses were just as stark. The couple’s livelihood depended largely on the paddy they grew. Much of it is now buried beneath layers of mud, soil and silt. With the next sowing window already passing, they say there is little chance of recovering the crop this year. They also lost most of their livestock. Around 35 chickens and 25 ducks were swept away. Of their three cows, only one survived.

The vegetables and leafy greens they grew were mostly enough to feed themselves, while they sold a small surplus of rice, around 10 kg of grain, to bring in some income. “We have no other way of earning,” she says.

Bandana’s experience was not an isolated one. In her ward, all 48 families – around 300 to 400 people – were affected by the flood.

Only two houses in the locality had terraces. For three nights, residents from across the locality sought shelter on the terraces of those two houses as the water rose around them.

The signs of destruction were everywhere. Several rooms in some houses remained covered in mud, while broken tin roofs lay on the ground around the houses. Mattresses, sofa covers and clothes lay strewn across courtyards, some spread out to dry, others left behind because they were too damaged to salvage.

On the muddy paths through the locality, residents had laid out damaged clothes and pillows so they could step on them rather than sink their feet into the thick sludge.

A disaster in the making 

Geologist Bijoy Krishna Chetia distinguishes between the flooding of the Janji river, which he said was associated more directly with intense rainfall, and the sudden flooding of the Dikhow river. “In Dikhow, there were flash floods, a sudden flood,” he said.

One possibility, he said, is that the Dikhow carried large amounts of material from the hills in Nagaland, including debris from landslides, disrupting the natural flow of the river. “The Dikhow brought along contents and parts of the hills,” he said.

But Chetia said other possibilities also need to be investigated, including the impact of mining and deforestation in the upstream catchment. Open-cast mining can leave large excavated areas in the landscape where water may accumulate, he said. 

At Rajapul, which too, is situated close to the Assam-Nagaland border, this reporter saw sections of the hills around Naginimora in Nagaland cut away, exposing large stretches of the slopes. 

However, Chetia cautioned that he had not visited the mining areas himself and could not establish whether mining contributed to the flooding in this particular case.

In 2019, former Nazira MLA and senior Congress leader Debabrata Saikia filed a PIL in the Gauhati High Court challenging illegal sand and stone extraction along the Dikhow river. The petition cited regulatory lapses and argued that unchecked mining was contributing to flooding. The court subsequently directed the Assam government to establish a specialised Mines and Minerals Task Force Battalion to curb illegal mining. Opposition leaders have since alleged that the directive was not properly implemented. 

Researchers, Chetia said, need to investigate whether the sudden flow was caused by landslide and debris movement, water accumulation associated with mining, or a combination of factors.

Deforestation and other changes to the hills can also affect how rainfall moves downstream. An intact hill can absorb and retain rainfall and release water gradually. When that landscape is disturbed, much more water can run off rapidly into downstream rivers, Chetia explained.

“The ecological balance needs to be maintained. The watershed has been destroyed due to deforestation, mining, urbanisation projects and unscientific infrastructural projects,” Chetia added. 

But the factors amplifying the flood were not confined to the hills. Downstream, decades of interventions have also changed the way water moves across the Assam plains.

“There were a lot of factors that led to the inundation of the area,” said Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman, a researcher on the Brahmaputra river basin. Weak embankments gave way in several places, he said, while the degradation of wetlands had removed some of the landscape’s natural capacity to absorb excess water.

“It would be wrong to say that one factor led to this,” Rahman said. “It’s the culmination of factors that led to this kind of a disaster.”

The natural drainage of the region has also been altered over decades, he said. Roads, highways and embankments have increasingly cut across the pathways through which water would naturally flow towards the Brahmaputra. 

The result, he said, is a landscape increasingly trapped in a cycle of destructive floods.

This disaster, Rahman said, was decades in the making, and the government cannot find an overnight solution. Building more roads or embankments risks repeating the same cycle if the larger river system and floodplain are not properly understood, he added. 

Communities need better preparation to reduce loss of life and suffering, Rahman said, “while the Brahmaputra basin needs greater investment in research and a more scientific understanding of how its rivers and floodplains are changing.”

Wait for cash assistance

Stories like Bandana’s are common across Rajapul. Archana Borthakur, who runs a small eatery, had opened her shop that day, not expecting the floodwaters to reach such levels. A divorced single mother, she depends on the eatery for her livelihood and lives with her child, brother and sister-in-law.

The shop was completely damaged, while the family’s pucca house was also badly affected. They are still cleaning it out. The family also lost all their livestock, while their scooter and another vehicle were severely damaged.

Enakshi Dutta, founder-director of Guwahati-based non-profit Roots to Branches, which has been working with affected communities on the ground, said the declining number of people in relief camps should not be taken as a sign that the situation is improving. People are moving between relief camps and their homes, she said, but many are returning to houses without belongings, crops or livestock.

With the sowing window already gone, Dutta said recovery would require more than immediate relief. “Families are already spending whatever savings they had on cleaning their homes and rebuilding, leaving them with little cash to restart their livelihoods.”

Dutta suggested a cash-for-work programme that could pay families for rebuilding their homes and communities, alongside support for food and livelihoods. Materials such as tin sheets and clothes are useful, she said, but cash may allow families to decide what they need most. The government’s Rs 15,000 assistance is helpful, she said, but inadequate given the scale of the losses. “Food insecurity and cash shortage will be the main things,” she said. “They will stay.”

So far, the government’s immediate relief has included kits containing rice, oil, salt, lentils and clothes. Many residents in Rajapul said they had received the kits, but the Rs 15,000 cash assistance had not reached everyone.

Paran Borthakur, Archana's brother, said some families in another ward were still waiting for the cash transfer, while some had received as much as Rs 30,000. In his ward, however, he said all affected families had received the cash assistance.

The uneven distribution of assistance is something Dutta also observed on the ground. Some affected communities are receiving more help than others, she said, and government agencies, NGOs and other stakeholders need to coordinate better to ensure relief reaches people according to their needs. 

The impact extended to other villages. In Khanikar Gaon in Ligiripukhuri of Nazira subdivision in Sivasagar, this reporter found 62 affected families gathered outside one of the least-damaged houses to collect relief supplies.

Umesh Gogoi, 65, said floodwaters rose to his chest inside his home, forcing him, his wife, son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter to take shelter on the terrace of a nearby house for four days before moving to a relief camp.

Gogoi, who depends on paddy farming, said his entire crop was destroyed. The 65-year-old said he had never seen flooding of this scale in the area. “This was boliya paani,” he said, using the Assamese expression for “mad” or “crazy” water. 

The flood has also made it difficult even to assess the damage to his fields. “If we go to our fields now, we won't be able to come out,” he said, referring to the deep mud and layers of silt left behind. He broke down as he spoke about having no way to grow the crop again.

The damage extended across Sivasagar district, including the historic Sivasagar town. Water remained stagnant in several parts of the town, with no clear outlet for it to drain. Chetia said rainwater was getting trapped because the highway is built at a higher elevation, while much of the town is low-lying, restricting natural drainage. 

Lakhima Panging, a teacher whose husband works in the ONGC's fire department, has lived in the colony since 2006. She said rainwater entered the colony on July 18 but receded by the following day. From the evening of July 19, however, the water began rising again. It entered their quarters and rose by around two to three feet. Panging pointed to the marks left on the walls as evidence of how high it had reached. 

The family had to leave their home and stay with relatives until the water receded. Their car was also badly damaged in the flood and, she said, it cannot be repaired.

Calls to Revenue and Disaster Management Additional Chief Secretary L S Changsan, Chief Secretary Ravi Kota, and Minister Keshab Mahanta went unanswered. Newslaundry has sent them questions on WhatsApp. This report will be updated if a response is received. 

Meanwhile, back in Rajapul, Bandana Buragohain prepares rice and lentils on an earthen stove outside, her kitchen having been completely damaged in the flood. The government and relief material would help for a few weeks, she says. “Then? What? What will we eat? How will we restart our lives?” 

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