When the floodwaters rose around their home in Rajapul on July 19, Bandana Buragohain had no way of getting out on her own.

The 70-year-old clung to the back of a man from her village as he waded into the current. At one point, the force of the water pushed him backwards. A couple of other boys came and helped carry her to a nearby house with a terrace, where around 30 others had already taken shelter.

“I somehow managed to stay alive. I could have died,” she recalled.

Rajapul, in the Nazira subdivision of Sivasagar district, was among the areas caught in the path of what several reports have described as one of Assam's worst localised floods since the 1950s. After days of heavy rain across the region, including 137 mm recorded over eight to nine hours in the neighbouring hills of Nagaland, a sudden rush of water moved downstream into the plains on July 19, sending the Dikhow, Disang and Janji, rivers that eventually meet the Brahmaputra, above extreme flood levels within hours and engulfing settlements before families could evacuate. The same rainfall triggered multiple landslides in Nagaland’s Mon district, killing nine people.

The death toll climbed to 100, with more than 2.12 lakh people affected across Sivasagar, Charaideo, Jorhat and Golaghat districts. Livestock losses were extensive, and 17,198 hectares of agricultural land were submerged. Within Sivasagar district, Nepali Khuti in Bihubar emerged as the epicentre of the disaster, with more than 300 families left destitute. Videos from the village showed bodies being recovered from beneath layers of silt.

Weeks on, the water has drained out of most of Sivasagar, but little else has been restored. For families in the affected villages, the livestock is gone, the sowing window has passed, and many still wait for cash assistance.

In Rajapul: ‘No other way of earning’

Bandana lives with her husband, Motiram Buragohain, 72, in a mud house that now bears the marks of the flood. Halfway up the blue mud walls, a brown waterline marks how high the floodwaters rose inside the house. 

The Buragohains have seven daughters. After the waters receded, almost a week later, one of their daughters travelled down from the nearby town where she lives with her husband. She spent hours clearing thick layers of mud and silt from the house and wiping down its blue mud walls with cow dung. But the house is still not fully clean. “It has been a task to clean it. It requires a lot of labour,” Bandana says.

Almost everything inside was destroyed. The kitchen was badly damaged. Whatever little furniture they had was washed away. Only a wooden bed remained, though its mattress was ruined.

Outside, the losses were just as stark. The couple’s livelihood depended largely on the paddy they grew. Much of it is now buried beneath layers of mud, soil and silt. With the next sowing window already passing, they say there is little chance of recovering the crop this year. They also lost most of their livestock. Around 35 chickens and 25 ducks were swept away. Of their three cows, only one survived.

The vegetables and leafy greens they grew were mostly enough to feed themselves, while they sold a small surplus of rice, around 10 kg of grain, to........

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