Dry in the Land of Floods: Assam’s Irrigation Paradox & Colonial Legacy

Bonojit Hussain

The images of parched fissures that split Assam’s paddy fields this kharif season—captured and splashed across television and smartphone screens—will vanish beneath the Brahmaputra’s next flood pulse, but the unease they have stirred should persist. On 9 February 2024 Irrigation Minister Ashok Singhal told the State Assembly that his department’s schemes covered “about 14 per cent” of agricultural land. A year later, while unveiling a five-year irrigation “master plan,” he conceded that Assam “still depends heavily on rain-fed irrigation,” despite 3,900 new and ongoing projects. A starred-question reply on 21 March 2025 placed the combined functional coverage of the Irrigation and Agriculture departments at just 24.28 per cent. Singhal has since promised weekly monitoring and the revival of failed lift schemes—an implicit admission that decades of investment have yet to create a system capable of cushioning a missed monsoon. These figures, and the contradictions they expose, demand a sharper question: why does an apparatus meant to manage water in one of India’s wettest states fail so swiftly, and what does that failure reveal about how Assam’s landscape—and those who farm it—have long been governed?

Numbers That Never Quite Add Up

Commentators often begin with rainfall charts, yet the more telling numbers are the ones the state invents. The last State Development Report on Assam (2009) admitted that official irrigation statistics had been unreliable since 1954. Sixteen years later little has changed. District engineers still file spreadsheets claiming every shallow tubewell or borehole irrigates ten—or sometimes forty—bighas, whether the casing has collapsed, the pump is missing, the diesel tank is empty, or the farmer has lost interest. On paper “irrigated area” balloons overnight; on the ground entire tracts remain rain-fed.

Two line departments sustain this overstated coverage. The Irrigation Department drafts medium- and large-scale lift schemes whose command areas often exist only on autographed plan sheets, while the Agriculture Department’s Engineering Branch distributes “minor assets”—boreholes, portable pumps, solar pump sets, delivery pipelines—paid for with subsidy forms thick with Aadhaar numbers and GPS-tagged selfies. Both agencies chase expenditure targets tied to the fiscal year rather than the hydrological cycle. Once a device is delivered and photographed, no one revisits its performance; its command area is simply assumed. Year after year paper records overstate the land actually served by functioning irrigation, conjuring water where none flows.

A Tale of Two Hydraulic Heritages

Today’s irrigation breakdowns make sense only when one recalls that the Brahmaputra Valley is really two contrasting hydraulic worlds stitched together by colonial cartography.

Upper Assam still bears the imprint of the Ahom state, whose systematic earth-moving—levelling mounds, raising baralis (earthen bunds) to divert water, and institutionalising transplanted wet-rice—produced a contiguous quilt of gently graded paddies. Gravity flow remains feasible; a well-placed canal or sluice can still spread water across dozens of plots without powered pumping.

Western (Lower) Assam—the belt the British parcelled into Kamrup, Darrang and Goalpara—followed a different trajectory. No monarch or canal board ever levelled fields on a comparable scale. Within a single village one basin may flood after the first heavy shower while its neighbour dries out days later. Historically, farmers bridged these micro-gradients through communal labour and ingenuity: bamboo lift-wheels hoisted river water, hand-cut channels followed subtle contours, and earthen check-bunds were rebuilt each season.

As agrarian relations became monetised across Assam, though at varying paces across regions and communities in the late twentieth century, those arrangements gradually collapsed. Collective labour grew scarce and commons shrank. Diesel pumps bought on subsidised credit, concrete check-dams poured overnight, and shallow tubewells sunk without regard to contour filled the gap. None of these gadgets replicates the delicate hydrology that the older commons once managed. Unsurprisingly, every district now listed as “drought-hit”—Kokrajhar, Baksa, Barpeta, Bongaigaon and Dhubri—lies in this western belt, where fractured topography meets one-size-fits-all engineering. Until planners acknowledge these divergent inheritances, new projects will keep designing for a landscape that exists only on paper.

Colonial Flood-Control and the Fiction of “Wasteland”

The story of irrigation failure begins not with pumps or canals but with the earthen embankments the British laid along the Brahmaputra and its tributaries between the 1870s and 1940s. Engineers in Calcutta did not see a river to be harnessed; they saw a floodplain that had to be dried so jute could move unimpeded to the mills of Dundee in Scotland.

The Public Works Department—specifically its Irrigation and Embankment Division—oversaw the works. In lower Assam the goal was jute cultivation; in upper Assam more limited embankments shielded tea gardens from annual inundation.

To justify the makeover, the colonial state leaned on a pliable biblical category—“wasteland.” Wetlands, swamp forests and seasonal grazing commons were declared idle because they were not under plough. Once branded vacant, these landscapes could be settled by cultivators willing to grow the empire’s cash crop. The most enthusiastic were Muslim farmers from East Bengal, accustomed to low-lying riverine agriculture. By 1941 more than a million acres had been settled under successive Wasteland Settlement Rules, awarded to these migrants.

The bargain soon unravelled. Embankments and drains dismantled the buffers that had made cultivation possible. Wetlands that once inhaled monsoon water were settled; spill channels were pinched shut; the river lost room to meander and instead scoured its banks. Erosion accelerated, chars calved downstream, and the floodplain grew brittle. East-Bengali families who accepted the colonial offer now live with displacement as a fact of life, moving to the nearest patch of “government” land—only to be branded encroachers and “doubtful citizens” when politics demands it.

Post-Colonial Continuity and the Punjab Mirage

Independence changed the rulers but not the hydraulic vision: Assam inherited hundreds of kilometres of embankments but virtually no canal command area. Meanwhile, national planners looked to the opposite hydraulic extreme. Punjab’s Green-Revolution landscape—dense grids of electrified tubewells paired first with high-yielding wheat and later with kharif rice—turned “assured irrigation” into a mantra. The hardware was treated as portable: what Assam supposedly lacked were shallow borewells, pumps and credit. Targets multiplied. By the Sixth Plan state ledgers brimmed with lift points, cluster tube-borings and “ring wells”; in 2010 the marquee Bringing Green Revolution to Eastern India (BGREI) scheme arrived, its brochures filled with glossy pump-sets. BGREI’s 2019 stock-take claimed 131,366 shallow tube-wells and 56,407 dug/bore-wells across seven eastern states—4,999 of the tube-wells and 45,805 of the dug/bore-wells in Assam alone.

Most pumps, however, never reached the field. Subsidies usually covered only drilling; farmers still had to buy or hire diesel engines—an expensive proposition in villages without dedicated agricultural power lines. An unequipped borehole irrigates nothing, and a rented engine costs about ₹300 an hour, often arriving late or proving too weak.

Assam thus carries two mismatched inheritances: a flood-defence apparatus liable to fail overnight and drown villages, and a groundwater grid made largely of pump-less borewells that cannot rescue plots lying above or below the contour they serve. The 2025 drought merely exposed a contradiction engineered long before the first cracks appeared in this season’s rain-starved soils.

Manufacturing Drought in a Land of Flood

During the past five monsoons, rainfall that once arrived in gentle instalments has collapsed into one- or two-day cloudbursts followed by weeks of silence. Whenever the pause tilts toward drought and showers finally return, low-lying plots often rebound, posting yields above their long-term average. In years when downpours tip toward flood, the opposite happens: waterlogged bottoms yield less, but higher fields—spared prolonged submergence—harvest more grain than usual. At the village scale the two curves largely cancel one another, so block-level production tables look comfortably flat even while individual households shoulder seed failure, replanting costs and lost labour.

That apparent stability reflects the resilience and juggling skills of Assamese farmers, not the protection of any irrigation grid or the success of official research.

Large surface projects still follow all-India design manuals that presume uniform terrain, while minor-irrigation programmes measure success by pumps or borewells installed, not by the litres they deliver a season later. Budgetary and electoral calendars reward rapid asset creation, so hydrological mapping at plot scale is skipped and construction races ahead of monsoon logic. Even where every rupee is spent the engineering is often mismatched to the land it must serve.

This drought therefore exposes more than a one-season anomaly; it lays bare an irrigation discourse that grafted a groundwater-intensive vision from the north-west onto a valley whose governing impulse had long been to keep water out, not bring it in. Embankment containment and tubewell expansion collided to create a hybrid system that satisfies neither strategy’s basic conditions.

Why the Structure Matters Before the Prescription

A drought invites quick fixes—seed compensation, pump repairs, another tranche of solar sets—but none of these gestures will last unless Assam confronts the deeper genealogy of its hydraulic regime. The tubewell grid was imported from wheat country; the embankment wall was a jute-frontier artefact erected first by colonial engineers and later by post-colonial governments seeking rapid, visible results. Together they produced today’s patchwork of overstated coverage, dysfunctional schemes and embanked brittleness, even as official returns keep inflating “irrigated area” that farmers know does not exist.

A debate grounded in this history can ask what crisis reporting never pauses to consider: How can a valley that receives 2,500 mm of rain swing from flood to drought in the same season? Should flood control and irrigation be planned as one basin-wide commons rather than siloed departments? Can the elevation maps farmers carry in their heads replace one-size yield tables at the planning desk? And what if wetlands and seasonal grazing lands were recognised not as “wastelands” but as living buffers essential to both flood and drought resilience?

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Bonojit Hussain is a full-time farmer and independent researcher based in Baridatara village, Nalbari district, Assam.

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