Assam floods kill 100+, with mining blamed for 'man-made disaster'

Debiram Panika was working in Nagaland when his phone rang on the morning of July 19. His wife Dipika's voice came through the video call, thin with terror. "This is it for us. We are going to die," she said. The line went dead. Within moments, the Dikhow River—a waterway that had always run past their village in Assam's Sivasagar district—rose up and tore through their home with the force of something alive. Dipika and their four-year-old daughter Radhika were swept away. Panika has returned to the ruins since then, searching the bushes and undergrowth each day for his daughter's body. It has not been found. His ten-year-old daughter Ridhika survived by clinging to a bamboo stalk while neighbors pulled her to safety.

Three days of relentless rain—July 18 through 20—had transformed the landscape upstream in Nagaland's hills. The deluge swelled tributaries that feed into Assam's river system and sent them roaring downhill with debris the size of trees. When the waters reached the villages of Upper Assam, they carried everything: entire homes, rice fields, livestock, and people. More than 100 died. Nearly 700,000 were displaced. Some 2,700 villages were destroyed or severely damaged. The state government counted 1.2 million people whose lives were disrupted in some way.

In Nepali Khuti village, a Facebook vlogger named Kukil Das watched trees forty meters tall come crashing down the hillsides, riding the flood like battering rams. "It was a tsunami," he said later. "There is no home left." Das and a friend named Shravan Prasad gathered seven boats and spent two days and nights pulling people from the water, saving roughly a thousand lives. A woman named Laxmi Sharma opened her concrete house to sixty strangers who fled to her roof as the river swallowed the ground floor. In Simaluguri village, two friends—Reihana Ahmed and Ratul Swarna, a Muslim and a Hindu, both in their thirties—drowned together when Swarna, who could not swim, jumped into the torrent to save Ahmed as she was being pulled under. Both bodies were found in the rice paddies.

But residents and experts say this was not simply a natural disaster. Biren Gogoi, a local observer, pointed to the mining operations that have scarred the region for years. Stone and sand extraction from riverbeds, coal mining in Nagaland's Mon district, and aggressive deforestation have stripped the landscape of its natural defenses. Between 2002 and 2025, Nagaland lost fourteen percent of its forest cover, with Mon district—which borders Sivasagar—bearing the worst damage. An official 2023 report documented the loss of nearly 795 square kilometers of forest in Nagaland over the previous decade. When Al Jazeera traveled the border region, reporters saw clear evidence of deforestation on the hillsides and active mining operations on both sides of the state line. Satellite imagery confirmed extensive coal mining in Mon and stone-crushing operations in villages like Bihubor, one of the flood's worst-hit areas.

Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman, a researcher who studies the Brahmaputra river basin and its tributaries, was blunt: the flood was "purely human-made." The unrestrained extraction of stone from the Dikhow riverbed had damaged what he called the river's natural cushion—the geological features that allow a river to absorb and resist high flows. Without that buffer, embankments fail and floods spread with devastating force. A 2022 government document, reviewed by Al Jazeera, had already flagged mining as a potential trigger for large-scale flooding downstream.

Local politicians blamed the state government. Debabrata Saikia, an opposition legislator from Sivasagar, accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of permitting illegal stone and sand excavations that had turned the riverbed into a cratered wasteland. "This unchecked plundering of riverbeds and hills under the ruling government has engineered this into a man-made disaster," he said. The state's Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma rejected the claim, attributing the floods to excessive rainfall in Nagaland. A cabinet minister later blamed climate change. The Deputy Commissioner of Mon district acknowledged that illegal mining might be occurring but said the land was protected under laws designed to safeguard Indigenous tribal rights, limiting government intervention.

In Prajabasti village, a seventy-five-year-old man named Asor Ali sat beside his wife, staring at the river that had destroyed everything around them. He had lived through the 1950 earthquake that killed nearly five thousand people and reshaped Assam's entire river system. He had weathered decades of monsoon floods. But he had never seen anything like this. "It will happen again," he said quietly, "so long as there is greed for land and coal in humans. Nature pays them back."