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Madhabi Das and Dandeswar Das, a couple in their late forties, nurtured a dream of undertaking improvement of their house to provide little more comfortable space to their three teenage children. The dream turned into a nightmare on June 17, when flood waters of the Puthimari river gushing through breaches in the embankment in this village washed away their house.
Houses of 16 other families also vanished while floods also damaged many houses in this and nearby villages beyond repair. Bagaribari area of Tamulpur district in Assam is about 60km off capital city Guwahati.
Pieces of concrete or wooden pillar, half-buried in thick layers of sand deposited by floods are all the couple and 16 other families could find as remains of their houses after water receded. On July 24, after 39 days of occurrence of the breach, the remains of houses of few households were still under water of a channel of the Puthimari river that started flowing through No 1 Bagaribari village.
“We also had about 70-80 Maunds (One Maund equals 40 kilograms) of paddy in the granary and there was no trace of even a single grain,” Madhabi Das’s voice choked with grief and overwhelmed with emotion. She was busy along with other affected villagers filling plastic sacs with sand for temporary restoration of the embankment.
Local residents say the current market price of paddy is Rs 650 a Maund (Rs 1625 a quintal) and the Minimum Support Price (MSP) announced by the government for 2022-23 is Rs. 2040 a quintal. Other families share the similar story of their granaries with paddy stocks being destroyed in floods.
The trauma of devastation was writ large on her face. However, her compulsion to fill as many sandbag as she could, to earn at least Rs 250- Rs 300 in the day made her focus more in work. Filling and carrying one sandbag to the worksite fetched a paltry sum of Rs 5 five and she needed to fill and unload minimum of 50 to 60 bags.
They were sweating in extremely and uncomfortably hot and humid July summer but there was no time to take a break. Some of them were worried over depletion in stock of empty sacks and kept asking everyone who arrived at the worksite including this reporter if they had come across anyone bringing fresh supplies of empty plastic sacks. No more sack means no more earning for the day.
The work began couple of days after Water Resources Minister Pijush Hazarika had visited Bagarbari on June 21 and directed the department to restore the embankment with temporary measures. Hazarika assured the affected families that permanent restoration work would be taken up in December. Local legislator of Rangia assembly constituency and state president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Bhabesh Kalita accompanied the minister.
A northern tributary of the river Brahmaputra, the transboundary Puthimari river originates in Bhutan hills and flows through Tamulpur and Kamrup district in Assam for about 80 km length of its stretch in India. It is known as Ooantang in Bhutan, Barnadi from India-Bhutan international border point, Puthimari in Tamulpur and as Puthimari and Lakhaitara before its outfall in the Brahmaputra about seven km downstream of Hajo town in Kamrup district.
According to the Water Resources Department, the river Puthimari has “an acute meandering nature in its journey through the alluvial plains and has a series of very sharp curves with reversed flow to the original channel” and “is very flashy having heavy silt loaded discharge during monsoon period”.
Deposition of sand following breaches in 2000 and in subsequent years rendered cropped land of most families in Bagaribari area unsuitable for paddy cultivation. They adopted sugarcane farming to cope with the crisis. After years of efforts to make cropped land fertile again through application of cow dung, the farmers started getting good yield from paddy cultivation over the past five years.
“With deposition of fresh layers of thick sand, we are back to square one,” Dandeswar Das grieved.
Das earns his bread as a sharecropper and also works as a mason in between two crop seasons. The embankment breached earlier in 2000, 2004, 2010, 2011, 2014-15, 2020 but villagers say that the scale of devastation this time was unprecedented.
“We shifted to the embankment in the evening of June 16 with little belongings when the water level of Puthimari rose above danger level. It was around 2.40 pm past midnight when the embankment breached, and the next morning there were no signs of the houses. Since then, we have been taking shelter on this embankment,” Das narrated to nezine.com on July 24.
On July 14, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma during his visit to this village drove a scooter for about 2km stretch of the embankment to inspect the breaches and ongoing temporary restoration work. After the inspection, Sarma assured the affected people that the embankment would be “scientifically built” to stop recurrence of breaches in future. He also said that the embankment will not sustain if it is built along the existing alignment and underlined the need for realignment. Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) Chief Executive Member Pramod Boro also accompanied the Chief Minister during the inspection during his they took a motorboat ride to survey the embankment alignment and condition.
The flood-hit families taking shelter in make-shift camps told nezine.com that relief supplies continued till the visit of Chief Minister, but they were buying their ration on their own with little money they could earn by working at the restoration site or taking up other daily wage-earning work outside the village. Dandeswar Das said that they got relief at the interval of ten days at the rate of 2 kg of rice, 100 grams of mustard oil, 100 grams of pulses (dal) for each family member.
Milan Das, a student of Bachelor of Arts in Rangia College, is among student members of the affected families currently taking shelter on the embankment, toiling in the sweltering Summer to earn some money to help their parents tide over the financial crisis. “My second semester examinations are scheduled to start on August 25. I have lost all my textbooks and study materials. Hope to buy the books with the money I will be able to earn and save,” he says.
Asked if he had received one-time book grant of Rs 1000 which the State Government promised to deposit in accounts of all flood-hit students, Milan said he had visited the bank branch twice and submitted his ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) documents but the account was still dormant. “I have not been able to check my account so far” he adds. The undergraduate student is visibly worried about preparation for his examinations and continuation of his studies. His college in Rangia town is located about 9 km from Bagaribari.
The state government also assured provide Rs 3800 as utensil grant for each affected family who have returned home. On July 16, the Chief Minister told journalists the State Government had identified 1,89,752 families and, barring 35,000 whose bank accounts were yet to be confimed, the amount has been credited to all other identified families. Several affected families of Bagaribari including Das’s have lost bank passbooks and are trying to retrieve the account number from documents submitted to local authorities for official purposes. Therefore, they have not been able to check if the amount has already been credited in their accounts.
Tamulpur became the 35th district in Assam on January 26, 2022. It was carved out from Baksa district of Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR). The BTC which enjoys autonomy under the provision of the Sixth Schedule of Indian Constitution runs the administration in BTR.
Of the total 228 breaches in embankments, 24 including the three in Bagaribari occurred in Tamulpur district alone. In 2004, which is referred to by the Assam State Disaster Management Authority as the worst flood in recent times in terms of destruction, altogether 109 breaches in embankments occurred in the state. Assam government informed the State Assembly that of about 90% of 4474.86 km length of embankments in the state are in dilapidated condition as most embankments have outlived their span.
Photo: 90-year old Harakanta Das sipping tea in a makeshift shelter on the embankment
Villagers allege that the maintenance work taken by Water Resources Department before the onset of Monsoon was inadequate. Three breaches occurring over a small stretch of the embankment left them baffled as to why the embankment was not raised and strengthened to protect them even after the breaches in 2020. Highest number of breaches this year partly explain why the cumulative number of inmates in relief camps swelled to 7,42,337. The two waves of floods also damaged 4711 roads and 227 bridges across the state.
The Water Resources Department floated a tender for reconstruction of breach of embankment at Bagribari and improvement of 21 km-Puthimari embankment from ncluding anti-erosion measures at different reaches Under SDRF for 2020-21 with tender value of Rs 8.50 crores. The closing date of the tender value was March 8, 2021, when barely two months were left or onset of flood season.
The high-profile visits and optics of post-disaster inspection paled before the plight of affected families as they continue to live uncertainty under the tarpaulin sheets on the embankment. The families will have to search for new sources of earnings as temporary restoration work underway will be over soon.
The two waves of flood from April till July damaged estimated 25,676 houses fully and 280,381 houses partially and affected 2,40,199 hectares of crop area in the entire state. Official disaster report of the National Disaster Management Authority till July 29 states that floods claimed 198 human lives while five persons were reported missing.
Assam government has announced payment of compensation of Rs 95,100 for fully damaged houses in plain areas and Rs 1,01,900 in hill areas in accordance with the guidelines of the State Disaster Response Fund.
“The amount of Rs 95,100 will not be sufficient even to clear the debri and deposited sand. How are we going to rebuild our houses with that little amount? People says you start a fresh from zero, but we will have to start with minus,” says Dandeswar Das. Other families echoed him. He also says that administration has so far provided two tarpaulin sheets to each affected family.
“If they had provided at least bundle of tin sheet, we could have at least built a temporary structure on our land instead of staying on the embankment under tarpaulin sheet,” lamented Samindra Das.
The river Puthimari, which swallowed dreams of these farm families along with their houses and granaries, is flowing quietly now. The affected families, whose life has become more uncertain, fear that the recurrence of devastation in the next wave of flood is the only certainty left for them, if the embankment is not strengthened and raised.
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