In the darkness, a mother plus her seven-year-old son, survived floodwater in their village for twelve hours clinging to a tree. She reassured the boy that if worst came to worst they could eat the leaves, and survive. So is disaster preparedness in Narendra Modi’s India in the year of 2026, where a tree is a refuge and a prayer is a salvation. No plan, no warning system, no evacuation route but only a tree and a prayer.
When the water level gradually dropped, the toll rose with at least 68 fatalities, 40 missing, and more than 600,000 families affected across 21 districts of Assam. The state’s Chief Minister, himself a member of Modi’s party, Himanta Biswa Sarma, reluctantly acknowledged it as the worst flood of the century here. Rainfall in various areas of the state was so heavy that it was near five times what is normal and in fact still the government reaction in New Delhi has been, like always, a quiet one, slowly coming out and overshadowed by other weekly business reports.
This is not bad luck. It is policy by neglect.
Assam is the unfortunate victim of floods about every year. Almost 40% of the state is on ground which is categorized as flood-prone areas. If something is repeatedly happening and is not being taken serious steps against then one cannot be surprised by it. In 2022, floods in Assam displaced more than four million people. In 2024, flooding all over the country led to almost 1,900 deaths, and Assam was one of the most adversely affected states. Now, in 2026 as expected, it is flood season here again – even more violent and lethal – only to be greeted by the same inadequate response: temporary relief camps, talk of “rehabilitation”, and no discussion of the structural defects that will lead to similar events happening every monsoon.
Where are the permanent flood defenses a G20 economy should have built by now? Where is the upstream deforestation policy that experts have been demanding for years? Where is the embankment infrastructure investment that should have followed every previous flood on this scale? The answers are not complicated, they simply haven’t been a governmental priority, because Assam does not generate the kind of headlines Modi’s government wants associated with “New India.”
That is the real scandal here. Governments spend a decade to perfect their global image management strategy. These include trillion-dollar economic projections, the unveiling of infrastructure projects in the most luxurious style ports airports, and industrial corridors as main headlines in television news programs. Modi has positioned India as a climate leader of the Global South and made speeches at international events like COP and the G20. Contrasting the speed and extent of state interest toward a stock market decline or a big corporate deal with its reaction to a flood that has taken lives of dozens and uproots hundreds of thousands seems very difficult.
At the same time families in Assam, are constructing the same sort of mud-and-tin houses in the same floodplain areas, year in and year out; because none of the governments, including this one, have ever considered their living as something that needs real capital to be made a national priority.
One gets ministers, task forces, and daily briefings. The other gets a chief minister’s press statement and a slow trickle of relief supplies to a population already exhausted from doing this every single year.
An eighteen-year-old girl who lost everything her family owned in minutes put it simply: it took them years to build that house, and no one knows how long it will take to build another. That sentence should embarrass a government that claims to be building the future of India. Instead, it will likely be forgotten within the news cycle, just as it was in 2022, in 2024, and every flood season before that.
Assam is not asking for sympathy. It is asking why, in a country that markets itself to the world as a rising superpower, its own citizens are still climbing trees to survive. Until that question is answered, and acted on, this will keep happening. And Modi’s government will keep looking away.
