Assam Floods: Engineering A Solution

Assam’s floods are often described as inevitable. From a civil engineer’s perspective, that is an incomplete diagnosis. Brahmaputra and its tributaries will overflow during extreme monsoon events, but flooding becomes a disaster when intense hydrological forces meet vulnerable settlements, ageing infra, inadequate drainage, and poorly planned development. This year’s floods have once again exposed this gap between the natural behaviour of rivers and the way humans have engineered the landscape around them.