Why three districts of Assam bore the brunt of the floods

A man searches for belongings amid the remains of his house that was washed away by flash floods due to heavy rain in a village in Sivasagar district of Assam on July 26, 2026. Photo credit: AFP

Story so far: Assam is used to annual floods, but the authorities and residents of three historically almost untouched districts – Charaideo, Jorhat and Sivasagar – bore the brunt this time. On July 23, the Assam government told the 126-member assembly that the situation was the worst in 60 years. Scientists say climate uncertainty is the “new normal” and no part of Assam or the rest of the Northeast region can or hopes to remain untouched.

Ancient texts considered Assam a water landscape, wrote academic Arupjyoti Saikia in The Unquiet River: A Biography of the Brahmaputra. Assam’s geographic location—split into two valleys surrounded by mountain states with narrow outlets into Bangladesh—makes it prone to flooding, even when it rains heavily in the hills of Arunachal Pradesh or Bhutan. The two valleys, named after the Brahmaputra and Barak rivers, are separated by the hills of Karbi Anglong and Dima Hasao districts. These rivers have about 120 tributaries and distributaries. Together, they carry huge volumes of sediment, contributing to the Brahmaputra’s expanding floodplain and widespread flooding, as seen in satellite images and flood extent analyzes from the Copernicus programme, the European Union’s flagship Earth observation initiative, and the Indian Human Settlements Institute’s Global Flood Mapper.

Published – 27 Jul 2026 10:58 IST