Policy Update
Purbaa Jagannath
Introduction
Assam’s relationship with flooding is not new, but the vocabulary of its flood policy is changing. For decades, the state’s response to the Brahmaputra and its tributaries was almost entirely structural: embankments, spurs, and dredging works administered by engineering agencies.
Since roughly 2015, and with particular intensity from 2024 onward, a second strand of policy has emerged alongside this one that treats wetlands, floodplains, and beels not as land to be reclaimed but as infrastructure in their own right, capable of storing and slowing floodwater. This article traces that shift, asks what “wetland-based flood mitigation” has actually delivered on the ground, and weighs it against a 2026 flood season that, even as restoration funds were being disbursed, left over sixty people dead and more than six lakh affected.
Background
The Brahmaputra is among the most sediment-laden and morphologically unstable large rivers in the world, and flooding is, in that sense, intrinsic to Assam’s hydrology rather than purely an anomaly to be engineered away.
For most of the post-Independence period, the state’s answer to this was embankment-building, coordinated loosely through the Brahmaputra Board, a central body established in 1980 to survey the basin and prepare flood-control master plans. Reviews of its functioning have repeatedly flagged chronic staff shortages and slow implementation, even as most of Assam’s flood-protection embankments have aged past fifty to sixty years, well beyond their intended design life.
Wetlands entered the policy conversation more seriously after 2015, when India’s wetland-conservation regime was recast through the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2017, which gave state wetland authorities a formal, if under-resourced, mandate to regulate activity around notified water bodies. Assam’s only Ramsar-listed wetland, Deepor Beel near Guwahati designated in November 2002 became the reference point for this regime, valued as much for its role as the city’s principal natural stormwater basin as for its biodiversity.
The more decisive turn, however, came in 2024–2026, when the Union Home Ministry began routing large sums through the National Disaster Mitigation Fund (NDMF) specifically for wetland restoration as a flood-control measure, explicitly framed as a shift away from pure embankment engineering toward ecosystem-based mitigation.
Policy Framework and Functioning
Assam’s wetland-based flood governance today operates through an overlapping, still-consolidating set of initiatives rather than a single unified programme.
Reservoir-style wetland identification (2024)
In September 2024, the state identified nine wetlands across flood-prone districts, including the Kawaimari Gaon wetland linked to the Sessa River in Dibrugarh, to function as storage reservoirs for excess Brahmaputra floodwater. The idea traced back to a suggestion from Union Home Minister Amit Shah that at least fifty large ponds be built across the Northeast to store floodwater while also supporting irrigation and tourism.
Basin-wide feasibility mapping
Two months later, the Union Home Secretary asked Assam to prepare a feasibility report, by December 2024, on connecting wetlands to flood-prone tributaries for water diversion. This built on survey work by the North-East Space Application Centre (NESAC), which had identified 271 wetlands across the state as technically suitable for floodwater diversion a figure officials cited as the outer boundary of what basin-wide wetland engineering could eventually cover.
Rejuvenation of specific wetlands (2025–2026)
By April 2025, the Assam State Disaster Management Authority’s executive committee had approved Detailed Project Reports for sixteen specific wetlands across flood-prone districts, worth roughly ₹634.83 crore, to be funded through the National Mitigation Fund. In October 2025, a High-Level Committee chaired by the Union Home Minister approved ₹4,645.60 crore in NDMF projects across nine states, of which Assam received one of the largest shares — ₹692.05 crore for restoring 24 wetlands across nine districts of the Brahmaputra system, cost-shared 75:25 between the Centre and the state.
By June 2026, state officials were describing a revised set of fifteen wetlands across nine districts under the same broad ₹692-crore plan. The same package also carries a companion urban component: an ₹2,444-crore, eleven-city Urban Flood Risk Management Programme Phase-2 that includes Guwahati.
Institutional actors
Implementation is distributed across the Water Resources Department (which prepares the DPRs), the Assam State Disaster Management Authority (which approves and reports on them), the Forest Department and State Wetland Authority (which hold regulatory responsibility for Ramsar and notified wetlands such as Deepor Beel), and, nominally, the Brahmaputra Board and NESAC for technical input an arrangement that places wetland-based flood governance at the intersection of disaster management, water resources, and environment portfolios rather than under one accountable authority.
Table 1: Wetland restoration funding and scale, 2024–2026
| Date | Announcement | Scale | Funding | Source |
| Sep 2024 | Nine wetlands identified as flood-storage reservoirs (e.g., Kawaimari Gaon, Dibrugarh) | 9 wetlands | Not separately costed | Northeastern Chronicle |
| Apr 2025 | ASDMA executive committee approves DPRs | 16 wetlands identified in flood-prone districts Northeasternchronicle | ₹634.83 crore Northeasternchronicle | Sentinel Assam |
| Oct 2025 | National Disaster Mitigation Fund tranche (9 states) | 24 wetlands across nine Brahmaputra-valley districts The Assam Tribune | ₹692.05 crore for Assam, out of ₹4,645.60 crore nationally; cost-shared 75% Centre / 25% state The Assam Tribune | Ajmal IAS Academy / News on Air |
| Oct 2025 | Urban Flood Risk Management Programme Phase-2 (11 cities incl. Guwahati) | 11 cities | ₹2,444 crore Sentinel Assam | News on Air |
| Jun 2026 | Revised project list | 15 wetlands across nine districts AssamInfo | Same ₹692-crore envelope | Assam Tribune |
Sources: Data compiled from Northeastern Chronicle and Sentinel Assam (September 2024, on the initial nine flood-storage wetlands) and Sentinel Assam (April 2025, on the ASDMA-approved DPRs for 16 wetlands). Figures on the ₹692.05-crore National Disaster Mitigation Fund tranche and the Urban Flood Risk Management Programme Phase-2 are drawn from ANI, News on Air, and Swarajya (October 2025), while the revised 15-wetland list is sourced from Assam Tribune (October 2025 and June 2026).
Table no:2
Flagship Site — Deepor Beel (Assam’s Only Ramsar Wetland)
| Metric | Figure |
| Ramsar designation | November 2002 |
| Bird sanctuary status | 1989 (core area ~4.14 sq km) |
| Historic wetland extent | Once spread over roughly 4,000 hectares |
| Current extent | Shrunk to about 500 hectares |
| NGT intervention | 2019 order directing declaration of an eco-sensitive zone and restoration of the core area |
| 2026 pressure point | 100+ trees cut for a proposed elevated railway corridor near the eco-sensitive zone |
Sources: Ramsar-designation and sanctuary-status details are drawn from Wikipedia’s “Dipor Bil” entry and Testbook’s Deepor Beel profile, while historic/current extent figures come from Ajmal IAS Academy and the Ethnobotany of Northeast India project page. The 2019 NGT eco-sensitive-zone order is documented on the same Ethnobotany page (citing Down To Earth, March 2019), and the 2026 tree-felling controversy is reported in Northeast Now (May 30, 2026), Sentinel Assam (June 2, 2026), and EastMojo (May 5, 2026).
Table no: 3
Wetland Loss Elsewhere — Panidihing Bird Sanctuary, Sivasagar
| Metric | Figure |
| Notified sanctuary area | 33.9 sq km |
| Actual wetland cover, 2021 | 0.82 sq km |
| % of notified area retained as wetland | ~2.4% |
Sources: Gauhati University Geography department study (Namita Sharma and Anup Saikia) using Landsat/Google Earth Engine imagery, reported in Assam Tribune, “Climate Shifts Shrink Panidihing Sanctuary Wetlands, Threaten Biodiversity: Study,” December 9, 2025.
Table no: 4
Current Monsoon (2026) — Cumulative Toll as of 26 July 2026
| Metric | Figure |
| Deaths | 66 (including 4 in the preceding 24 hours — 3 in Sivasagar, 1 in Charaideo) |
| People affected | ~6.55 lakh, down from 7.05 lakh the previous day, across six to nine districts |
| Villages submerged | 810 |
| Crop area damaged | 34,970.8 hectares |
| Worst-hit districts | Sivasagar, Charaideo — both named in the 2025–26 wetland-restoration package |
Sources: Cumulative toll figures are drawn from ASDMA’s Disaster Reporting and Information Management System (DRIMS) bulletin dated July 26, 2026, as reported by ANI, “Assam Flood Death Toll Rises to 66 as 4 More Fatalities Reported; Over 6.5 Lakh People Affected Across 10 Districts,” July 26, 2026
Table no: 5
Table 2: Multi-year comparison — Assam flood death toll (for trend context)
| Year | Deaths | People affected | Districts hit |
| 2020 | 122 (96 flood + 26 landslide) newsonair | ~28 lakh | 26 |
| 2024 | 66 | ~22 lakh | 28 |
| 2025 (Jun) | 16 (early season) | ~5.6 lakh | 19 |
| 2026 (as of 26 Jul, ongoing) | 66 | ~6.55 lakh | 6–9 |
Sources: 2020 — Deccan Herald, July 24, 2020. 2024 — News on Air, July 7, 2024. 2025 (June) — News on Air, June 5, 2025. 2026 — ANI, July 26, 2026.
A caution on that last table: these are different points in each year’s monsoon (some early-season, some end-of-season), so treat it as rough trend context rather than like-for-like comparison Assam’s flood toll varies more with rainfall intensity in a given year than with any single policy input.
Performance
Judged against its own flagship site, the record of wetland-based governance in Assam is uneven. Deepor Beel has held Ramsar status since 2002 and legal protection as a bird sanctuary since 1989, yet its water-spread area has reportedly contracted from around 4,000 hectares historically to roughly 500 hectares today, squeezed by encroachment, the adjoining Boragaon landfill, and unplanned urban expansion.
A National Green Tribunal order in 2019 directed the state to declare an eco-sensitive zone around the wetland and restore its core area; that demarcation remained a live point of dispute as of 2025, and in 2026 more than a hundred trees were cleared near the same eco-sensitive zone for a railway corridor project, drawing objections from environmental groups even as railway authorities defended it as a measure to reduce elephant deaths.
A comparable pattern shows up elsewhere: reporting on this year’s floods noted that wetland cover at the Panidihing Bird Sanctuary in Sivasagar district, which historically helped regulate flows from the Brahmaputra, Desang, and Demow rivers, had fallen to about 0.82 square kilometres out of a 33.9 square kilometre notified area by 2021. Meteorological authorities investigating the 2026 floods pointed to this kind of wetland degradation, alongside weak embankments and roads, as a structural contributor to flood severity not merely heavy rainfall.
Meanwhile, as of 26 July 2026, ASDMA’s own bulletins recorded 66 flood-related deaths and more than 6.5 lakh people affected across ten-plus districts this monsoon, with Sivasagar and Charaideo both districts named in the 2025 wetland-restoration package among the worst hit. That the flood season most affected the very districts targeted for wetland rejuvenation does not, on its own, prove the restoration effort failed; the 2025–26 projects were barely a year into a multi-year rejuvenation timeline. But it does mean the policy has not yet been tested through a full monsoon cycle under completed restoration, making performance claims at this stage necessarily provisional.
Impact
The clearest impact of the 2024–2026 push is scale and framing. For the first time, wetland restoration has been funded at the scale of hundreds of crores through a dedicated national mitigation channel, and it has been explicitly positioned by the Union Home Ministry and state officials alike as a shift from structural flood control toward ecosystem-based flood management. That reframing matters: it puts wetlands on the same policy footing as embankments and dredging, rather than treating them as an environmental afterthought.
But the impact is qualified by three features of how the programme has actually run. First, the shifting wetland counts across announcements nine in 2024, sixteen in April 2025, twenty-four in October 2025, fifteen again in June 2026 suggest a plan still being redrawn rather than one being executed against a fixed baseline, which makes it difficult for outside observers to track what has actually been restored.
Second, restoration funding has flowed even as encroachment, landfill dumping, and infrastructure clearance continued at Assam’s best-known wetland, indicating that money for rejuvenation has not yet been matched by enforcement against the pressures causing degradation in the first place.
Third, because implementation sits across several departments and two funding tiers (NDMF at the Centre, state co-financing), there is no single public dashboard tracking cumulative hectares restored, water-retention gains, or flood-peak reduction attributable to the programme a gap that limits both public accountability and the state’s own ability to learn what is working.
Emerging Issues
Fragmented authority
Responsibility for wetlands as flood infrastructure is split between disaster management, water resources, and forest/environment departments, with the Brahmaputra Board’s chronic staffing shortfalls limiting its technical contribution. No single authority is accountable for the programme’s overall flood outcomes.
Conservation versus infrastructure conflicts
The 2026 tree-felling for a railway corridor near Deepor Beel’s eco-sensitive zone illustrates a recurring tension: infrastructure projects justified on other public-interest grounds (here, reducing elephant deaths) can still erode the very wetland buffer that flood policy depends on.
No flood-plain zoning law
A parliamentary standing committee reviewing flood management noted that major flood-prone states, Assam included, had not enacted flood-plain zoning legislation that would restrict construction according to flood frequency a gap that continues to allow settlement and construction on the drainage channels wetlands are meant to protect.
Weak independent monitoring
Unlike MGNREGA-style social audits, NDMF-funded wetland restoration in Assam currently has no equivalent third-party verification mechanism to confirm that sanctioned DPRs translate into restored water-retention capacity on the ground.
Basin-scale and transboundary limits
Wetland restoration within Assam cannot address upstream drivers of flood severity — intensifying rainfall in the catchments of Arunachal Pradesh, Bhutan, and Tibet — which engineers reviewing this year’s floods argue require basin-scale, not district-scale, planning.
Way Forward
A single nodal authority for wetland-based flood governance
Consolidating oversight of NDMF-funded wetland restoration under one body logically the State Wetland Authority, working jointly with ASDMA would close the accountability gap between departments and give the shifting project lists a fixed reference point.
Complete and enforce the Deepor Beel eco-sensitive zone
Finalising the long-pending ESZ notification, and applying it consistently to infrastructure projects as well as private encroachment, would test whether the state is willing to protect its flagship wetland against the same pressures its restoration budget is meant to reverse.
Enact flood-plain zoning
Bringing forward the flood-plain zoning legislation flagged by the parliamentary standing committee would address the upstream cause of wetland loss — unregulated construction on drainage channels rather than only funding downstream restoration.
Independent, publicly reported monitoring
A standing, third-party audit of restored wetland area, water-retention capacity, and encroachment status, published on a fixed schedule, would let the scale of NDMF funding translate into a scale of public accountability.
Basin-scale coordination
Strengthening the Brahmaputra Board’s technical capacity and linking Assam’s wetland restoration to upstream data-sharing arrangements would situate district-level wetland projects within the basin-wide planning that engineers reviewing the 2026 floods have called for.
References
About the Contributor
Purbaa Jagannath is a Research Intern at IMPRI (Impact and Policy Research Institute), working on policy writing. She completed a Bachelor of Social Work (Honours with Research), with a minor in Political Science, at Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar College, University of Delhi, currently she is pursuing her masters in TISS mumbai in Social Work. Her work spans social work, political science, and grassroots fieldwork across India, with recurring interests in governance, community development, and youth empowerment.
Acknowledgment
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to IMPRI (Impact and Policy Research Institute) for giving me the opportunity to write articles and providing me with this platform. I would also like to thank the reviewers Ayan Bordoloi and Ameya Satam for their work.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the organisation.
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