The cows were their livelihood, but the flood took everything

…they lived came down to luck, and luck did not come. Tied at the neck, the cows could not keep their heads above the rising water; their ropes pulled taut and became nooses. By the next morning, all but one were dead. “ When we came down to clean the cowshed the next day, only one cow had survived. The rest of them died of strangulation. Imagine tying a noose to the neck of a human ,” Sharma said. Of the family’s 80 chickens, 10 remained. Of eight goats, four. Their mid-size SUV, bought the year before with seven installments still left to pay, lay upturned on a wooden beam. But it was the cows…

…department has focused on embankments, bank protection, drainage and erosion control along the Brahmaputra and Barak—an approach some researchers say leans too hard on engineering at the expense of local knowledge. “ The government needs to spend more on adaptation rather than post-flood measures and embankments, which are top-down in nature ,” said Rajiv Sutradhar, a development economist at North-Eastern Hill University. A World Weather Attribution analysis published on 14 August found that this year’s rainfall in Assam was not historically extreme but…

…between a flood hazard and a flood risk. "The rainfall associated with this year’s floods was certainly capable of producing flooding, but the rainfall itself was not exceptional in today’s climate,” she said. “ What turned that hazard into such a severe disaster was the way people, infrastructure and livelihoods are distributed across the landscape, and how the landscape itself has changed. ” A new pilot Assam does have an early-warning system. Its disaster management authority receives flood alerts—ranked low, moderate, high or very high—from the North Eastern Space Applications Centre 12–48 hours in…