Why Real Impact Of Assam’s Riverbank Erosion Is Unclear

She had good reason to be--her home was dismantled due to riverbank erosion.

Asma was already struggling to make ends meet--the loss of the roof above her head was one blow too many. “I am unable to eat and sleep,” Asma said. “I am constantly worried.”

Asma and her two adult children had sought refuge with relatives, but she told IndiaSpend that she would soon shift to a nearby char. A char is a river island formed by silt deposits. There are more than 2,000 chars in the river Brahmaputra, all of them cut off from the mainland, and many inhabited by farming communities. Every two or three years, a char will erode when the river swells in monsoons, and the people living there have to leave their homes.

They are also extremely fertile--thus, for generations, local communities have settled on these islands as they take shape, living in homes of bamboo and mud, establishing homesteads, raising families and eking out a living through farming and fishing, as IndiaSpend reported in June 2022.

While Tarakandi is not a char, it is located on the banks of the river Beki, one of the tributaries of the Brahmaputra. According to locals, during monsoons when water levels rise, the land in Tarakandi starts to erode. This forces people to move to a char nearby, or migrate to towns and cities for survival.

Forty-five-year-old Asma Khatun's house in Tarakandi village in Kalgachia subdivision of Assam’s Barpeta district was swallowed by riverbank erosion. Asma and her two adult children had sought refuge with relatives.

Tarakandi is mainly inhabited by Muslims of Bengali origin--who are often seen as “outsiders” and “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh by many locals and native groups in Assam.

“Over the years, Brahmaputra and Beki met and became one, and the swollen river swallowed a lot of land,” said Baharul Islam, 36, another native. “Now it has reached our village and soon nothing will remain of it. In the last few days, around 50-60 families have had to move because their land and houses were eroded.”

Many riverine districts in Assam are affected by erosion every year. According to an assessment by the Rashtriya Barh Ayog, about 40% of the state’s area, some 3.1 million hectares, is flood-prone. That is around 9.4% of the flood-prone area across India.

Further, the state has seen about 8,000 hectares of riverbank erosion each year, on average, resulting in a total loss of 427,000 hectares or 7.4% of land area between 1950 and 2010.

Local social workers as well as experts say mitigating riverbank erosion is a big challenge for the Assam government, and that it needs a comprehensive strategy, which the state is yet to come up with. Further, the lack of data on how much land has been lost, how many people have been affected and how many received rehabilitation makes it difficult to assess actual impact, experts say.

“There has never been a solution to this problem,” said Lutfar Rahman Khan, a local businessman from Barpeta town. “Stability is no longer possible for the riverine people.”

‘If my house breaks, I don’t know what I will do’

Twenty-five-year-old Moina Khatun cannot remember when she last had a good night’s sleep. “We wake up in the middle of the night to check if the river is inching towards us…the sound of the river and the land erosion never allow us to sleep.”

Moina lives in a home near the riverbank, with her three minor children. “If my house breaks, I don’t know what I will do,” she said, adding that her husband lives in Bongaigaon, a town about 52 km away from Tarakandi.

Moina, who is trying to complete her matriculation, got married when she was 18 years old. River banks, with their silt deposits, are fertile. At the time of her marriage, her husband Abdul Ghani Khan used to farm cabbage, cauliflower, brinjals, chillies, jute, etc. Then the river swallowed their small patch of farmland and since then, he has had to migrate to Bongaigaon to find work as a daily wage labourer, and comes home once every fortnight or so.

While Moina is scared that her house will be swallowed up in the next wave of erosion, Asma’s home is already gone. Her son managed to finish his grade XII, but hasn’t been able to take any exams that will allow him to study further. “I have no money for his education,” Asma said. “I fear he will end up working as a daily wage labourer despite completing school.”

Twenty-five-year-old Moina Khatun cannot remember when she last had a good night’s sleep. She lives near the riverbank, with her three minor children. “If my house breaks, I don’t know what I will do,” she says.

Migrating to work at a brick kiln

Residents of Tarakandi live with the constant fear of displacement. According to Rafiqul Islam, a social worker from Barpeta who is associated with Humanitarian Aid International’s local member Anchalik Gram Unnayan Parishad, erosion eats away land on which houses and farms stand. “Some find temporary refuge on nearby embankments, while others take shelter with relatives,” Islam said. “A few families, more fortunate, manage to purchase small plots of land in nearby villages and towns. For most, however, migrating to the towns is the only option of finding work and survival.”

Take 30-year-old Abdul Basid, who was born in Tarakandi. He never went to school because, he said, his family was too poor to afford schooling, and thus he had to work from a young age.

Basid used to grow chillies on his small patch of land, and once the river took away the land, he began working at a brick kiln in Moran town of Dibrugarh district in upper Assam. Moran is about 530 km by road from Tarakandi, and Basid says a group of people are usually taken on an overnight bus to work at the brick kiln there.

Thirty-year-old Abdul Basid migrated to work at a brick kiln after his cropland was destroyed due to riverbank erosion. The family returns to Tarakandi just prior to the monsoons. “During the monsoon, we are home, watching the water level rise and fearing the worst.”

Basid has been working at the kiln for seven years now. It doesn’t pay him well, but he continues because it is the only way he knows to earn money to feed his family. When they go to Moran, his family--wife and three children--accompanies him. “My wife also works at the kiln and the children end up missing school for several months when they are at the kiln,” Basid said. “The place where we stay is terrible but we have to somehow manage.”

Basid said they are made to work for eight to ten hours at a stretch. “They pay us Rs 500 as daily wage, but sometimes they only give us Rs 300-400, without any proper explanation. We are targeted because of our identity.”

Work at the brick kiln begins from September and ends in March, and the family returns to Tarakandi just prior to the monsoons. “During the monsoon, we are home, watching the water level rise and fearing the worst.”

Migrating to work at a brick kiln is not restricted to Barpeta district alone. Forty-three-year-old Aynuddin Mollah lives in Dhubri district. Earlier, he was living on the Koimari char. It is the nature of chars that during the summer months the silt brought by the Brahmaputra piles up, building up the land--but equally, during the monsoons when the river is in spate, the rush of water erodes the land.

Mollah has had to build and rebuild his home 14 times, until he finally decided to give up completely. He took up work at a brick kiln near Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh along with his wife. “I work six months at the kiln in UP and the other six months I am here, living with my brother, doing fishing.”

Mijanur Rahman, a grassroots social worker from Gossaigaon in the Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR), an autonomous territory in Assam, said, “Riverbank erosion forces families to go to cities for alternative livelihood, which affects their socio-economic life. Children are trafficked and pushed into labour. Their nutrition and education is at stake. The root cause is erosion.”

Lack of district-wise data

Last year, Rahman filed a request under the Right to Information (RTI) Act to find out three things about his area: how many people were affected in erosion, how much land has been lost due to erosion, and how many people have received rehabilitation.

Rahman filed the RTI in person at the revenue circle office in Gossaigaon where three days later, he was told that there was no data available on the queries he had raised. No government data was available on rehabilitation either, Rahman said.

While the government of Assam’s water resources department has information on overall area eroded and on the number of villages and families affected in the state till 2006, the data have not been updated since. Even the existing data do not provide a district-wise toll of riverbank erosion in Assam.

Abdul Khaleque, a former Congress member of Parliament, said the government does not have a data bank on how many people are homeless due to erosion. “These people should get a migration certificate because they might go outside to work where they might need a certificate that their land is gone,” Khaleque pointed out. “This certificate should come from the revenue department.”

“On some occasions, when district administrations have been requested for information, they have been able to provide the number of families affected, but they have no information on the extent of land lost and the status of rehabilitation,” said Evita Rodrigues, a climate policy researcher. “These are critical details needed to address erosion. This information must be made available to researchers, the media, and civil society at large if we are to collectively tackle this issue.”

IndiaSpend reached out to the government of Assam’s water resources department for comments on whether they have a district-wise data bank of how much land has been lost and how many people have been affected due to riverbank erosion in Assam. We will update the story when we receive a response.

We also reached out to the Assam state disaster management authority asking if there has been any rehabilitation work undertaken for those affected due to riverbank erosion in Assam, and whether there are any data of the number of people rehabilitated due to riverbank erosion. We will update the story when we receive a response.

No comprehensive strategy yet

Congress MP Pradyut Bordoloi points out that the Brahmaputra water system comprises the mainstream trans-boundary river of approximately 3,000 km in length flowing through China, India and Bangladesh down to the Bay of Bengal. “The Brahmaputra mainstream and some of its tributaries, especially in the plains of Assam, are actually like flowing waterways carrying huge silt from upstream, and characterised by frequent course-changing habits which have been aggravated in the last 40 years.”

Bordoloi said the riverine erosions “can not be mitigated by localised or ad hoc anti-erosion measures. It has to be addressed by making a holistic plan”.

Short term plans have been taken up but nothing concrete has been done since Independence, said Sherman Ali Ahmed, legislator from Baghbar constituency of Barpeta district. “The World Bank's Assam Integrated River Basin Management Project (AIRBMP) includes a component to improve disaster preparedness for the Beki river basin in Assam but that too will not be successful because the entire length of the river has not been taken up.”

“If we want erosion to stop altogether, then, the river will have to be assisted in flowing in one course,” Ahmed says. “The Brahmaputra is no longer one river, it has so many branches and tributaries. Until and unless we are successful in making the Brahmaputra flow in one course, as one river only, I don’t think we can achieve anything concrete.”

Khaleque, too, had similar opinions. He said the government is taking many short term measures that are not up to the mark. “We haven’t been able to declare erosion as a national disaster. When I was in Parliament I tried, along with other colleagues, to work towards it being declared a disaster. But the government hasn’t been considering that.”

IndiaSpend reached out to the government of Assam’s water resources department for a comment on the long term measures undertaken by the state to deal with riverbank erosion. We will update this story when we receive a response.

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