In 2020, Assam was underwater and almost nobody outside the state was talking about it.

Then Arsenal and Chelsea posted about the floods.

Adil Hussain, the actor from Assam, pointed out the absurdity of English football clubs having drawn more attention to his home state than India's own media. 

That was six years ago.

This month, he's saying it again. Except now it's personal, as his nieces are stuck in Sivasagar, their houses filled with water, and he's trying to organise help from Delhi.

Her words: "Not many people are talking about it."

Meanwhile, this year alone, 66 people have died. 

Over 6.5 lakh remain affected and more than 800 villages are underwater. The Chief Minister said Charaideo district recorded rainfall 436% above normal.

British botanist Francis Kingdon-Ward was in Assam during the massive 1950 earthquake, post which he wrote that the Brahmaputra used to cause major floods roughly once a decade. 

After the earthquake, they became nearly annual as the quake had dumped enormous amounts of sediment into the rivers, and they never settled into a stable course again.

So we built walls. 

Under the National Policy on Floods, 1954, embankments became Assam's main defence and today the state has over 4,900 km of them, the largest network for any Indian state of its size.

The embankments stopped the smaller floods and people felt the land behind them was safe, so they settled there.

But when an embankment failed, the water hit far more people than before, which led to demands for more embankments, which encouraged more settlement behind them.

70 years of embankments, and flooding had only become more damaging.

Take Guwahati, the city once had more than 450 ponds and wetlands, many of which are now gone.

Deepor Beel, the city's biggest natural flood buffer and Assam's only Ramsar-designated wetland, has shrunk by at least 35% since 1991. 

It was recognised as a Ramsar site in 2002.

Three years later, the local municipal corporation (GMC) built a 24-hectare garbage dump right next to it.

Other beels near the city centre went the same way. In the mid-1990s, people were allowed to settle on wetlands meant to store rainwater during storms. 

Then we cut the hills, and Guwahati is surrounded by them. 

When they're cut for construction, loose soil washes into the drains every monsoon. The drains fill with silt and water has nowhere to go.

On 19 April 2026, Guwahati received 117.4 mm of pre-monsoon rainfall in 24 hours. The city's drainage couldn't handle it, more than 50 localities flooded, and schools shut the next day.

The city also sits lower than the Brahmaputra during monsoon and wetlands used to store the excess rainwater until the river level dropped. 

Now those wetlands are neighbourhoods so instead of filling wetlands, the water fills people's homes.

Floods get attention because they're visible and temporary. The water rises, the videos go viral, the water recedes but erosion barely gets mentioned.

Since 1950, Assam has lost 4.27 lakh hectares of land to river erosion. That's 7.4% of the state.

And because Assam has no separate category for erosion victims, they get recorded as flood-affected. In the same column as someone whose kitchen filled with water for a week and drained.

The Mising community has lived alongside floods for generations. 

But the government classifies these houses as kutcha, meaning temporary, and banks don’t like it. (given the low status connotation that comes with it)

So the house that survives the flood is the one nobody wants while the house that’s prone to flooding is the one you can get a loan for. (own something permanent in a dangerous place >> something movable in a safe one.)

India genuinely shows up for Assam. 

The Air Force flies in food and drinking water, relief camps open and donation links go up. This year, the state BJP announced a ₹12 crore drive to distribute 2 lakh mekhela-chadors.

The problem is that all of it happens after the water has entered people's homes. 

When something happens once, it becomes news. 

When it happens every year, it becomes a season, and who can argue with nature, right?

But this was never about the climate. 

Wetlands were filled and hills were cut while embankments manufactured a false sense of safety, and erosion victims got written into the same column as people with wet kitchens.

This was built by us. 

Which means it can be undone.

That's why Adil Hussain saying the same thing 6 years apart bothered me enough to write about it today. 

Attention alone was never going to fix a design problem.

Hit reply and tell me: what's one thing in your life you stopped trying to fix because it happens so often you started calling it normal?

I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh