Disaster Risk Governance and Response Management for Flood: A Case Study of Assam, India

Flood and erosion in the State of Assam, India, is menacing and probably the most acute and unique in the country. Every year due to successive waves of floods, most of the areas in the valley of Assam remain submerged for a considerable numbers of days. Regular flooding added with persistent erosion causing land loss of thousands of hectares resulting to hundreds of people landless virtually destabilize the socio-economic development of the state. It has been observed that every year, the mighty Brahmaputra River is eroding more than 2000 ha of land. Subsequent to the National Policy for Flood in 1954 by the Government of India, flood control activities in the State of Assam started taking place. As envisaged in the National Policy for Flood, the state could take short-term as well as long-term measures for flood mitigation, but to get the immediate relief to the flood-ravaged state, construction of embankments as short-term measures had been widely adopted. In the state as a whole, the total area eroded by Brahmaputra, Barak and their tributaries since 1954 is 3.86 lakh hectares, which constitute 7% of the total area of the state.