By Syed Zarir Hussain
Dhemaji (Assam) : Elderly Tulan Dutta stared blankly from a raised mud embankment with the swirling grey floodwaters washing away a cluster of huts in his village in front of his eyes.
Dutta and his family of 12, including three grandchildren, are among an estimated 5,000 people in Assam’s Dhemaji district whose lives will never be the same again. Dhemaji is about 500 km east of Guwahati, the principal city in the northeast Indian state of Assam.
“God’s curse has fallen on us. The floodwaters washed away everything without a trace,” Dutta told IANS as tears welled in his eyes.
The flash floods a fortnight ago caught everyone by surprise with the river Kumatia, a tributary of the mighty Brahmaputra, suddenly changing its course.
“The Kumatia is now flowing through some 15 villages comprising about 1,000 families. Its course has changed and it seems these people have very little chance to get back to their homes in the future,” Dhemaji District Magistrate D.N. Mishra said with a voice filled with emotions.
Dutta, a petty farmer of Dihingia village, never dreamt in his life that they would be left landless in a matter of hours.
“We were born amid the river and it is the same Kumatia that made us paupers overnight. Now you cannot make out if a village existed in the area,” said Dutta, flanked by his shell-shocked family.
His wife Rupahi is in tears but tries to console her husband: “Maybe we can go back to our village once the floodwaters recede.”
But her consolation failed to soothe Dutta as he knows it was next to impossible.
“During floods in the past we would stay in makeshift shelters for about two weeks or so and then move back to our homes. But now the situation is different with our village turning into a river after the Kumatia changed its course,” said Durlav Saikia, another farmer from village Murolchuk.
Some 15,000 people are currently staying in makeshift shelters with the authorities providing them food, medicines and drinking water.
“We have to rehabilitate them in some other places by giving land to these 1,000 families. I know this is a very sentimental issue for these people to start life afresh in a different area,” Mishra said.
Every year, the floods leave a trail of destruction, washing away villages, submerging paddy fields and drowning livestock, besides causing loss of human life and property in this state of 26 million people.
The monsoon was scattered in Assam last year, thereby sparing millions of people from the ravaging floods. In 2004, at least 200 people had died and more than 12 million were displaced in the floods.