Monsoon in Guwahati, the commercial hub of Assam, gives you a sinking feeling. One heavy shower for about an hour, and more than half the city is in knee-deep, if not waist-deep water. The monsoon is yet to descend on the Northeast, but Guwahati has already had this experience at least five times in the past two weeks, prompting Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi to call an emergency meeting of concerned officials. He directed them to remove all encroachments that added to the congestion of drains in the city.

Guwahati’s woes, in fact, have their (eroded) roots in the reorganisation of the Northeast carried out by Indira Gandhi in 1972, which led to the creation of Meghalaya out of two hill districts. The move also forced an almost overnight shift of Assam’s capital from Shillong to Dispur, which is a part of Guwahati. However, with the absence of a thorough masterplan, the city underwent a completely unplanned growth, barely constrained by the Brahmaputra in the north and the Meghalaya foothills on the south. Needless to say, these geographical challenges played into the problems Guwahati is facing today. The decision to shift the capital from Shillong to Dispur was political and administrative, but ecological considerations were never taken into account. “This has resulted in overcrowding of settlement areas and encroachment on the hills and wetlands, leading to various hazards, including severe waterlogging as well as deaths due to landslides,” points out Mahfuza Rahman, a professor of geography in Cotton College here, who has done an extensive study on Guwahati.

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