GUWAHATI, July 28 -- Rupak Gogoi, a 38-year-old government school teacher in Assam's Sonari, the headquarters of Charaideo district, and his elderly parents and 31-year-old brother, had barely finished dinner on July 18 when floodwaters rushed inside their ground-floor home. It rains heavily in the district, but a flooded home was a first. As the water level kept rising, the family was forced move to the first floor, while carrying a few important belongings but leaving behind most heavy household items. "The water, which rose to over five feet, slowly subsided by Tuesday evening. But nearly 50% of the things inside the house-beds, mattresses, and the refrigerator-were damaged," said the resident on July 26. The family's two two-wheelers were damaged by silt and sediment left behind by the floodwater, as was Gogoi's car. "The last time our area witnessed flooding was in 2018. But it was on a much smaller scale. The kind of devastation we saw this time was something else," he said. The situation is similar for most residents of Charaideo and Sibsagar, the two Assam districts that have experienced unprecedented flooding. Assam witnesses floods almost every year during monsoon, and this time too, 25 of the state's 35 districts have been impacted. But Sibsagar and Charaideo, two districts where flood-related damage is usually minimal, bore the brunt in this round. Until Saturday, of the 66 people who had died across the state due to floods, 48 were from Sibsagar and Charaideo districts. Nearly 400 villages and around 500,000 people (of the 654,000 affected in total) of the two districts are still affected, and close to 15,000 have taken shelter in relief camps. On Friday, following a review meeting on the flood situation, chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said that heavy rainfall in Nagaland, which received 85mm of rain against a normal of 30.3mm (an excess of 181%) between July 18 and 20, led to a sudden rise in water level in the two neighbouring Assam districts. "The Mokokchung district in the state received 493% more rain than normal during that period. There was excess rainfall in Wokha and Mon districts as well in those days," said Sarma. He said that Charaideo district in Assam also got 436% more rainfall than normal on those three days and Sibsagar district got 104% more rain. "So, the excess volume of water flowing from Nagaland coupled with above average rainfall in the two Assam districts led to many areas in Sibsagar and Charaideo districts getting submerged. These two districts usually don't get flooded," said Sarma. Sibsagar MLA Akhil Gogoi, who is from the Raijor Dal, on Saturday said that apart from heavy rainfall in Nagaland, other factors like mining along the Assam-Nagaland border areas (both legal and illegal) and removal of stones and sand from river beds in the area also contributed to the deluge. "IMD has clarified that there was no cloud burst in Nagaland that led to flooding in Assam. One factor was the heavy rainfall there. Another was illegal mining, which led to the formation of large pits. Once these pits flooded, the excess water spilt over to the Assam side," he said. Experts believe that while the flooding in the two districts was massive, the incident is part of a pattern seen in several areas of the Northeast, particularly in Assam, which is a big floodplain surrounded by hill states. Rahman said,"Scientific measures to predict such disasters, lessons learnt from past disasters, international cooperation to find solutions and proper coordination between government and other sectors are needed."...