The Ultimate Guide to Assam floods 2026: The rain falls in Nagaland, the ruin lands in Assam. Can it be fixed?

The most unjust thing about the 2026 Assam floods is a matter of geography.The rain that drowned Sivasagar, Charaideo and Jorhat did not fall on them. It fell on the hills of Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, on slopes stripped of trees and torn open for coal, stone and roads. The water and the mud gathered speed there, in one set of states, and then arrived as catastrophe in another. The people who paid the price were not, for the most part, the people who cleared the hills.In Part 1, the scientists explained how an intense but not extraordinary monsoon became a disaster: hills that could no longer hold their soil, rivers silted too shallow to carry the flood, and embankments quietly left too low to matter. That was the diagnosis. This is the harder part. Can it be undone? And who, across a border the water simply ignores, is supposed to do it?The scientists who study these rivers believe it can be undone. But their answers range from the hopeful to the deeply uncomfortable.THE HILL CAN BE HEALEDStart with the good news, because there is some, and it comes from a man who has proved it on the ground.Professor Arup Kumar Sarma, the hydrologist at IIT Guwahati, does not believe a stripped hillside is a lost cause. His life's work rests on a simple, stubborn idea: that a degraded slope can be nursed back to health, and that when you heal the hill, you calm the river below it.The tool he reaches for has a technical name, Ecological Management Practices, or EMPs. Behind the jargon, the concept is intuitive. EMPs are a bundle of nature-friendly measures, some living and some built, that together slow water down, hold soil in place, and coax rainwater into the ground instead of letting it rush off the surface."A denuded hill can be reversed back significantly by implementing an optimal combination of Ecological Management Practices, which include various nature-friendly vegetative and structural measures, including rainwater harvesting," Professor Sarma tells India Today Digital. A denuded hill is simply one stripped bare of its plant cover. Rainwater harvesting means capturing rain where it falls so it soaks in or is stored, rather than running away at once.Two ideas underpin why this works. The first is surface runoff, which is rain that fails to soak in and instead races downhill across the ground, gathering soil as it goes. The second is infiltration, which is rain that sinks gently into the earth. Bare, compacted slopes produce a great deal of the first and very little of the second. Healthy, vegetated slopes reverse that balance. Less runoff means less flooding downstream, and more infiltration means more soil stays put, and more groundwater is quietly recharged.A house in Sivasagar ravaged by the floods. (Photo: PTI)Professor Sarma has watched this happen. He points to a pilot project at Garbhanga, near Guwahati, where his concept was put to the test."The Guwahati Metropolitan Development Authority implemented our concept of EMP in a pilot watershed at Garbhanga, near Game Village, and we could reduce the sediment yield by three times, and the well that did not get water earlier used to get sufficient water, indicating a reduction in surface runoff and an increase in infiltration," he tells India Today Digital.Read what that quietly means. By treating the hillside, they cut the soil washing off it to a third of what it was, and a dead well came back to life, because the rain was now sinking into the ground instead of sluicing off it. The soil conservation department has since applied the same practices in two more Guwahati watersheds.His research on how degraded hill catchments shed water and sediment, and how they can be nursed back to health, has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Water Resources Management and the Journal of Hydrologic Engineering. The proof exists. The problem is scale."Guwahati has more than 100 degraded watersheds," Professor Sarma says. "For the Northeast, degraded watersheds are releasing more sediment and more water into the valley part." And the causes, he is careful to note, are many. "Degradation can be caused by many things, like mining, road construction and expansion, and urbanisation."He draws one distinction that is easy to miss but matters enormously for a fast-growing region. A city and a bare hillside do not misbehave in the same way. "While urbanisation releases more sediment during the execution period, it releases more water after completion of construction, as paved and concrete surfaces do not allow infiltration and generate more surface run-off," he explains. "Such surfaces, however, do not release sediment, as they make a cover."In other words, a construction site bleeds mud while it is being built, but once it hardens into concrete, it stops shedding soil and instead sheds water, faster and in greater volume, straight into the drains. It is a warning worth heeding as Guwahati and the Northeast's towns spread outward.A CURE THAT PAYS FOR ITSELFBut here lies the political knot at the centre of everything. Why would Nagaland or Arunachal Pradesh spend money and forgo mining income to heal hills, when the flood lands in Assam?Professor Sarma's answer is elegant, and it turns the whole problem on its head. Restore the hills, he argues, in a way that pays the people who live on them."The hilly part is also suffering from landslides. We can restore the hill through EMPs by choosing valuable yet erosion-resisting grasses, brushes, orchids, plantation and so on, so that both states can have a win-win situation," he tells India Today Digital.The point is that the plants which anchor a hillside need not be worthless. Choose species that both grip the soil and carry a market value, and the hill stops sliding while its people start earning."Small-scale industries for utilising those plants can be developed even in Assam, and a market link for those products needs to be developed," he says. "Planning must be done with due emphasis on the livelihood of people of both the states."This is the crucial reframing. The hill states are not being asked to sacrifice for their downstream neighbour. They are being offered a different way to make a living from the same land, one that happens to protect Assam as a side effect. Landslides threaten Nagaland and Arunachal too. A stable, income-generating hillside serves everyone who lives on it and everyone who lives below it.