Assam Chief Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma (Photo: PTI)
October 16, 2022: Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Saturday released a report on 'Floods and Impacts on Livelihood in Rural Assam' prepared on behest of the state government's think tank State Innovation and Transformation Aayog (SITA) on 15th October.
The report titled 'Floods and Impacts on Livelihood in Rural Assam How could the State break the Poverty Trap?' is a research article which outlined several major points to curb out the problem of floods and the possible policy interventions and measures needed to weather through it.
The study was sponsored by SITA and was prepared by Cotton University. The researchers involved in putting out this report visited 83 villages across eight districts of the state and interacted with 1,100 households.
To start with, the report said the negative outcomes generated on multiple fronts by floods at present -- physical and institutional settings -- are emerging as major impediments of development and "persistent poverty" in Assam.
The Human Development Index (HDI) of Assam, it said, could have been much higher and the state would have been a front runner in India's pursuit to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) had there been measures to prevent the negative outcomes emerging from regular floods.
Unfortunately, floods have been a perennial issue for Assam, which impacts a large cross-section of people living specifically along the floodplains. Assam has two major rivers - Brahmaputra and Barak - with dozens of tributaries.
The report included that outmigration for work has emerged as a prime mode of coping in floods affected villages of the state and agriculture is the prime occupation for a majority of the households in flood-affected areas.
Faced with floods every year, household members, the report said, are now looking for job opportunities, mostly outside the state, for any jobs beyond agriculture to earn a livelihood.
Short-term measures to mitigate floods induced crises:
The report said though much compensation packages would be enough to avert the negative fallouts in floods affected and sand casted households/villages, or resources will be required to bring back the productivity of the land, is a question difficult to answer, but immediate interventions are however need to ensure availability of food, water, sanitation facilities, and health care and repair the damaged households to bring back the situation to normalcy.
"The causes of discontent among people in flood-affected areas are largely because of the inadequacy of the quantity, inferior quality, and untimely distributions of the food materials. In this context how the state would consider its preparedness, and of the people as well," it said.
The nature of floods, which have become unpredictable in recent times, has constrained the plan of interventions and preparedness. Unpredictability, it cited, is also because of a sudden release of water from the reservoirs of the hydel power generation units located in surrounding hills and mountains.
Against that background, the report makes a case for disseminating information to the downstream people, besides chalking out a plan to release water gradually in advance reading and taking advantage of the available rain forecasting system.
In case of floods damaging houses and agricultural fields, the report said the employment guarantee programmes of the state need to be converged for reconstruction activities, reclamation of agricultural land (removal of sandy layers), restoration of school infrastructure, and compensating work days loss in the process.
Land degradation is now a widely reported phenomenon caused by floods in Assam.
Long-term measures for flood mitigation:
It started by stressing that absolute protection to all flood-prone areas against all magnitudes of floods is neither possible nor economically viable as the money spent on flood control through building dykes and embankments is huge. In addition, there are maintenance and reconstruction costs.
On the erection of embankments along rivers, it said the state needs to consider two factors in its approach to have embankments as flood disaster prevention measures.
The embankments, it said, need to be firm and solid with the support of all technologies available at present, leaving no scope for eventuality; secondly, it must have sufficient outlets so that embankments do not create waterlogging and damage agriculture fields once the water level recedes.
"The structure of embankment however is criticised or objected by the people on the grounds of denial of fertilising silt to the agriculture fields, rise in bed levels of rivers because of sedimentation, blocking natural drainage from the countryside and the catastrophe created on breaching."
Further, the report said natural depressions, swamps and lakes could be used for regulating the release of water, which it believes could be a less expensive mode of flood management provided there are an ample number of such geographical features across the state.
The main function of the State Innovation and Transformation Aayog is to evaluate and monitor all government Schemes both Central and State within the State of Assam. SITA has been renamed from State Planning Board, Assam by the Cabinet in a decision taken in its meeting held on November 9, 2016.
Chief Minister Sarma, while releasing the report in Guwahati, said the Assam government is trying to make SITA similar to that of NITI Aayog at the state level and asked the think tank to involve universities in Assam for research and policy formulation in making policymaking more decentralized and people-led.