‘It was a tsunami’: Floods leave death trail in India’s Assam

Assam, India – Debiram Panika, a 37-year-old daily wage labourer from northeastern India’s Assam state, would speak to his wife and two daughters on video calls every day from Dimapur, a town in neighbouring Nagaland state where he worked. But when his phone rang at about 11am on July 19, there was panic in the voice of his 30-year-old wife, Dipika. We are going to die,’ before the call was disconnected,” Panika recalled, speaking to Al Jazeera.

It was the last time they spoke. Moments later, rising waters from the nearby Dikhow River, which snakes past their village in Assam’s Sivasagar district, surged into their bamboo-and-mud home with a ferocious current and swept away Dipika and four-year-old daughter Radhika. Sivasagar is part of the eastern Assam region, also referred to as Upper Assam.

Incessant rains between July 18 and July 20 submerged the region and the neighbouring Naga Hills of Nagaland. Monsoon floods usually impact northern and western Assam, and parts of central Assam, the worst. But several Nagaland districts bordering Upper Assam received heavy rainfall on those three days, leading to dozens of landslides.

This intense run-off swelled Naga Hills-origin rivers and caused devastation downstream. The resultant floods killed more than 100 people, destroyed 2,700 villages, and displaced 700,000 people across the state. The state government says 1.2 million people were impacted in all, their lives disrupted.

Most waters have since receded, but Radhika’s body is yet to be found. Ridhika held onto a bamboo bush and was later rescued by locals. Several riverine villages in Sivasagar have been wrecked by debris carried down by the waters of the Dikhow from the surrounding Naga Hills.

Tens of thousands of tree trunks lie piled up in places that used to be homes, as lush rice fields, the main source of livelihood, have been washed away. Kukil Das, a 30-year-old Facebook vlogger in Debiram’s village of Nepali Khuti, told Al Jazeera that “the torrent of the flood was like an apocalyptic event seen in the movies. It was a tsunami.” Das and his friend Shravan Prasad, from the neighbouring Bihubor village, said they saved at least 1,000 lives by using boats the two villages had at that time.