Can Assam figure out a solution to its flood problem?
It was raining on the morning of 22 September when Madhurima Barua, a professor at Rangia College in Kamrup, left for work from her house in Anil Nagar in Guwahati. When she returned in the evening, she had to be ferried home from the main road in one of the boats provided by the National Disaster Rescue Force (NDRF). “In my lane, the water was neck high,” she told me when we talked on the phone earlier this month. “For three days, I was stuck in my house with no electricity and very little drinking water—the two half-litre bottles provided daily by the NDRF were insufficient for my family of three. We survived on the bread and biscuits they provided.”
Earlier in June, a similar flood had forced Paromita Das, a resident of Pub-Sarania, to abandon her house. “The water level inside the house nearly reached my waist,” she said when we talked on the phone earlier this month. “Our full gas cylinder was floating in the kitchen. Our car was submerged and somehow a cycle rickshaw transported us to my mother-in-law's house for ten days.”-
Flash floods and waterlogging are not new to Guwahati. In many localities, frequent waterlogging has seen residents building upper floors to their houses where they escape to when floodwater enters their homes. “Last year we built an upper floor and moved there as the ground floor is waterlogged for days during the monsoon months,” Barua said. “We have not rented out the ground floor as we do not want tenants to face the problems we did.”
This year witnessed two of the worst episodes of flooding the city has ever seen. Eleven people died in the floods in June, and five in September. The government was forced to close schools and colleges for days. Dhrubajyoti Das, Additional Deputy Commissioner of Kamrup Metro District, told me that at least 6000 people had to be sheltered in relief camps in the city last month.
Thereis growing acknowledgement that Guwahati’s problem is man-made to a large extent. Many localities get water-logged even after an hour’s rain. Faced with the citizens’ ire, the government realised that it had to act fast. Early July saw the beginning of amassive eviction and demolition drive to clear the channels— mainly the Bharalu, Marabharalu, and Bahini rivers—that carry the city’s storm water, as well as to clear encroachments on the wetlands—Silsako, Deepor Beel and Bondajan—surrounding the city, which serve as reservoirs for flood water. Over the past few years, there has been muchconcern about illegal encroachment on the wetlands, leaving the area with no natural outlets to absorb excess rainwater.
In the absence of a long-term strategy to tackle floods and the problem of drainage, the demolition drive was also meant to exhibit the government’s efforts. Aided by police presence, the demolition squads went about breaking down walls, houses, hutments, and even targeted a few business establishments whose buildings encroached on river banks. Within a few days, though, thousands of people gathered under the aegis of the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (an organisation formed to fight for the rights of small farmers and labourers) to protest the drive.
The KMSS has been demanding land rights for those settled in Guwahati’s hills and wetland areas since 2011, and had supported the demolition drive in the beginning, but soon decided to oppose it. “We had supported the eviction drive as we wanted the government to clear all the river channels to stop the flooding,” said Amar Bezbaruah, vice president of the KMSS, when I spoke to him on the phone last week. “But we are now against it because the government has only targeted the poor encroachers. It has not targeted rich establishments and buildings. Perhaps they are afraid of costly litigation or they are protecting vested interests, but we are not willing to support this drive that is conveniently targeting the poor.”
The leader of the KMSS, Akhil Gogoi, puts the numbers of encroachers at around 85,000 families—almost 4 to 5 lakh people. “Close to 1200 to 1500 families have been evicted by the government after the floods, without any rehabilitation,” Gogoi told me over the phone earlier this month. “More than half of those the government calls encroachers are the original inhabitants of Guwahati—Bodo, Karbi and Manipuri tribals and old Muslim settlers. When the state capital moved to Guwahati, these people were gradually pushed out. Tribal people often do not have any written system of land ownership or records, and those who were pushed out took refuge in the hills. The rest of the encroachers are poor migrants—drivers, mechanics, rickshaw pullers, etc., who cannot afford rented accommodation in Guwahati’s plains.”
Arupjyoti Saikia, a professor at IIT Guwahati who has studied the problem of encroachment on Guwahati’s hills, offered me a slightly different explanation. “Post 1980, there has been a rapid expansion of the city, accompanied at the same time by the collapse of the agrarian economy in the state,” he explained, when I met him at his residence in IIT Guwahati’s staff quarters. “Prices of rice and jute have been falling over the years, and the system of minimum support prices and public distribution is not as strong in Assam as it is in north India.” This, he pointed out, has fed migration from rural Assam, and led to the growth of a vast working-class population in Guwahati. “As per the 2011 census, almost 40 percent of the city’s population is working class,” he said. “For these poor migrants, the areas surrounding Guwahati—the hills and the wetlands—are a neutral space where government control is weak. Hence they have settled there without land ownership.”
Saikia puts the blame for Guwahati’s current predicament on the lack of political will and pro-active thinking on the part of town planners. “Guwahati is positioned on the bank of a vast river, the Brahmaputra, which carries one of the highest quantities of sediment in the world,” he said. “The adjacent hills and the Shillong plateau acts as a catchment area for the river, and yet, post-1970, there has been no long-term planning for drainage. The vast wetlands surrounding the city are either connected to the Brahmaputra or were connected to the river at some point. Planners have simply not taken into account the city’s ecological fragility.”
Themassive economic loss caused by flood damage this year is yet to be accounted for. The state government has now constitutedan expert panel to find a solution, and a Rs 750 crore plan to revamp the city’s drainage is being devised. But it remains to be seen whether this will tackle the problem entirely. Already, some of those evicted have returned to their former residences and the district administration has vowed to re-evict them. Saikia argues that it is difficult to stop the flow of migrants to Guwahati. “The government needs to expand the city horizontally, build satellite townships, resettle people and improve connectivity for people to travel from suburbs into the city,” he said. “We need industries, but the government cannot continue with giving wetland areas to industries.” Only after a solution is found will Guwahati be able to take steps towards fulfilling its much-touted potential to be the next big hub connecting South and Southeast Asia.