Assam Crisis : How Melting Glaciers, Rising Seas & Decades of Political Neglect Are Threatening Indigenous Communities

Assam Crisis : How Melting Glaciers, Rising Seas & Decades of Political Neglect Are Threatening Indigenous Communities

Melting Himalayan Glaciers and Rising Brahmaputra Waters Threaten the Assam’s Indigenous Identity 

Four Decades of Betrayal: How Successive Governments Failed Assam, Accelerating Climate Disaster 

ANJAN SARMA

There is a phrase in Assamese – ‘Axomok doxokor pasot doxok dori obohela kora hoise‘ – that roughly translates to ” Assam has been neglected for decades.” To many scholars, activists, and ordinary citizens watching events unfold in the Brahmaputra Valley today, it has become the defining metaphor for what is happening to the Khilonjia – the indigenous peoples of Assam – and to the land they have called home for thousands of years.

What confronts Assam in 2026 is not a single crisis but a convergence of three – a “triple-axis” catastrophe, as some researchers have begun to call it. From the north, warming Eastern Himalayan glaciers are feeding an increasingly volatile Brahmaputra River, swallowing the valley’s fertile soil at a pace that is scientifically documented and climatologically inexorable.

From the south, rising sea levels in the Bay of Bengal are transforming Bangladesh from a densely populated delta nation into an archipelago of shrinking islands, generating a human displacement crisis of staggering proportions.

And in the political centre, four decades of broken promises, weaponised citizenship laws, and bureaucratic indifference have turned the question of who belongs in Assam into a permanent electoral instrument – rather than a resolved, administrative matter. The result, demographers and security analysts warn, is a state that may be unrecognisable -culturally, demographically, and ecologically – within a generation.

Part I: The River That Devours

Standing on the banks of the Brahmaputra near Majuli – the world’s largest river island and a UNESCO-recognised cultural heritage site – it is easy to understand why ancient Kamrupia /Assamese civilisation revered this river as a God. The Brahmaputra is enormous, mercurial, and magnificent. It is also, increasingly, a destroyer.

According to parliamentary records and statements made in the Lok Sabha, Assam loses approximately 8,000 hectares of fertile agricultural land every single year to riverbank erosion. Over the past seven decades, the state has watched more than 4.27 lakh hectares – roughly 7.4 percent of its total land area – vanish beneath the churning waters of the Brahmaputra and its tributaries. This is not a slow, incremental process. It is relentless, cumulative, and accelerating.

A comprehensive 2024 assessment published in Frontiers in Earth Science documents the dramatic morphological changes reshaping the Brahmaputra basin, noting that even in downstream Bangladesh, the Brahmaputra-Jamuna system displaced an average of 60,000 people per year through riverbank erosion alone. In Assam, an estimated 7,000 families are uprooted annually, stripped of their homes, their farmland, and their livelihoods. The 15th Finance Commission finally recognised river erosion as a natural calamity in Assam – a long-overdue acknowledgment – but, as lawmakers have noted, bureaucratic inefficiencies continue to hinder the distribution of relief funds to the communities that need them most.

The flooding situation compounds the erosion crisis. The Brahmaputra and its tributaries account for nearly 40 percent of India’s total flood-prone area, according to the Rashtriya Barh Ayog (National Flood Commission). In 2023 alone, floods affected 20 districts and displaced over one lakh people. The state government acknowledges that 31.05 lakh hectares – nearly 40 percent of Assam’s total land area – is chronically flood-prone. The economic losses from annual floods and erosion have been estimated at approximately Rs 200 crore per year, a figure that almost certainly understates the true human cost.

The engine driving this catastrophe lies upstream, in the Eastern Himalayas – the mountain chain that scientists and hydrologists call the “Third Pole” of the planet, for it holds the highest concentration of glacial ice outside the Arctic and Antarctic.

Part II: The Melting Third Pole

The Hindu Kush Himalaya stretches 3,500 kilometres across eight countries, from Afghanistan in the west to Myanmar in the east. Within this vast arc of ice and rock, the Eastern Himalayan glaciers – those feeding the Brahmaputra system – are among the most vulnerable on Earth. Unlike their counterparts in the Karakoram or the Western Himalayas, they sit at lower latitudes and lower altitudes, making them extraordinarily sensitive to rising temperatures.

A landmark 2023 study by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) delivered an alarming prognosis. At 3 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels – roughly where current global climate policies are tracking – glaciers in the Eastern Himalayas, including Nepal and Bhutan, will lose up to 75 percent of their ice volume by 2100. At 4 degrees of warming, that figure climbs to 80 percent.

The Sikkim GLOF of October 2023 – which destroyed a major dam, swept away bridges, and killed dozens of people – was a vivid and violent preview of what the Brahmaputra Valley may face with increasing frequency. Scientists studying GLOF susceptibility in the Eastern Himalayas have identified dozens of lakes as high-risk, their retaining walls of glacial moraine growing thinner and more fragile with every passing warm season.

Climate Change Hits Hard: Northeast India Battles Drought-Like Conditions

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The paradox of glacial melt is particularly cruel: in the short term, it produces more water, driving more violent floods and more severe erosion. In the medium and long term, it threatens the very existence of the river as a perennial water source, undermining the agricultural civilisation that grew up around it. More than a billion people depend on the river systems fed by Himalayan snow and glacial melt. For Assam, the stakes could not be higher.

Part III: The Drowning South

If the north threatens Assam through elemental force, the south threatens it through human tragedy on an almost incomprehensible scale.

Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries on Earth, home to approximately 170 million people crammed into a delta nation barely larger than the state of Iowa. It is also, by multiple measures, one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world – ranked ninth in the 2023 World Risk Report for climate risk exposure, with vast stretches of its territory lying barely above sea level.

NASA’s 2024 analysis confirms that global mean sea level is rising at approximately 0.59 centimetres per year. But for the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta region, the effective rate of inundation is significantly worse, because the delta is also subsiding – sinking under its own weight of sediment, compounded by groundwater extraction. The combination of sea-level rise and land subsidence creates an effective inundation rate closer to 5 millimetres per year in large parts of coastal Bangladesh, a figure that translates into catastrophic land loss over decades.

The projections from international agencies are sobering in the extreme. By 2050, a projected half-metre sea-level rise could cause Bangladesh to lose up to 11 percent of its total land area, directly threatening the livelihoods of tens of millions of people. The World Bank, in its landmark Groundswell report, projects that 13.3 million Bangladeshis may become internal climate migrants by 2050 – making climate change the dominant driver of internal displacement in the country. Under a pessimistic emissions scenario, that figure could climb to nearly 19.9 million, according to the Migration Policy Institute’s 2024 analysis.

When the collapse of agricultural livelihoods is factored in – saltwater intrusion already reduces rice yields by up to 50 percent in affected coastal areas, and the World Bank warns that by 2050, one-third of Bangladesh’s agricultural GDP may be lost – the potential scale of movement across the region becomes truly staggering. The UNFCCC has documented that 6 million Bangladeshis have already been displaced by climate hazards. Disasters displaced people within Bangladesh 14.7 million times between 2014 and 2023, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

Critically, Bangladesh and India share a long, porous, and poorly monitored border. A significant portion of that border – approximately 263 kilometres – runs along the frontier with Assam. The history of cross-border movement is deep, complex, and contested. Climate scientists and migration policy experts, including those cited in a major 2024 analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, assess that it is “all but certain” that climate migration from Bangladesh to India is growing, though its precise scale is difficult to measure.

For Assam, which already sits at the epicentre of a longstanding and bitter debate about illegal immigration, the convergence of this southward climate pressure with the state’s own ecological crisis and unresolved political history creates a situation of extraordinary fragility.

Part IV: The Politics of a Broken Promise

To understand why Assam is so unprepared for this convergence, one must go back to the summer of 1979, when a discrepancy in the Mangaldoi by-election voter rolls – a sudden, inexplicable surge in registered voters – lit a fuse that had been smouldering for decades.

The Assam Movement (1979–1985) was, at its core, a civilisational protest. Led by the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) and the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP), hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Assamese people – students, farmers, teachers, professionals – took to the streets demanding what seemed like a straightforward ask: that the government identify and deport the illegal migrants who had crossed from East Pakistan and later Bangladesh, and who were, the movement argued, systematically altering the demographic composition of the Brahmaputra Valley.

The movement culminated in the Assam Accord, signed on 15 August 1985 by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the leaders of AASU and AAGSP. It fixed 24 March 1971 as the cut-off date for identifying illegal migrants. Those who had entered after that date were to be detected and deported; those who had entered between 1966 and 1971 were to be removed from electoral rolls for ten years. Crucially, Clause 6 promised “constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards” to protect and promote the cultural, social, linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people.

Four decades later, the Accord’s core promises remain, in the words of legal and political analysts, a “bureaucratic tangle” – a monument to broken political will. According to the official Assam government’s own data, a total of 1,39,910 illegal immigrants have been identified since the Accord was signed. Of these, only 29,984 have been deported – barely 21 percent of those identified, and a tiny fraction of the numbers suspected by scholars and activists to actually be present in the state. The Accord’s own implementation records reveal that between 1986 and 2014, a mere 1,432 re-infiltrators were detected and deported – an average of fewer than 51 people per year over nearly three decades.

Toxic Clouds Over the Himalayas: A Growing Health Crisis

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The Assam Gana Parishad (AGP), the political party born directly from the movement’s leadership, came to power in 1985 with a historic mandate and the hopes of millions riding on it. Its failure to implement even the core detection and deportation clauses of the Accord it had helped create led, as analysts at the Sentinel newspaper have noted, to “a rapid erosion of its support base.” The party has since fragmented, and the idealism of the movement has been replaced by the cynicism of competitive electoral politics. The AGP is not a regional party now, it is a sister-concern of BJP- the protector of ‘Illegal Hindu Bangladeshis’ in Assam in the name of religion and AGP is voiceless!

Successive governments – Congress, AGP, and BJP – have found it far more electorally profitable to deploy the “foreigner issue” as a permanent campaign tool than to resolve it administratively. As one political observer noted bluntly: a solved problem generates no votes.

Part V: The Number That Will Not Go Away – 1.9 Million

If the Accord was the first great broken promise to indigenous Assam, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process was the second – though its failure operated in a different, and arguably more devastating, register.

The Supreme Court of India, responding to a petition by the NGO Assam Public Works, ordered an update of the 1951 NRC in 2013. The process – which required residents to produce documentation proving their own or their ancestors’ presence in India before 24 March 1971 – consumed years, enormous public resources, and the emotional energy of millions of families who found themselves suddenly having to prove what they had always taken for granted: that they belonged here.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS EVERYWHERE

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On 31 August 2019, the final NRC was published. Of Assam’s 33 million residents, 31,121,004 were included. 1,906,657 people – approximately 6 percent of the state’s population – were excluded, rendering their citizenship status deeply uncertain and placing them, as Amnesty International India noted in a joint statement, “at the brink of statelessness.”

The excluded were not predominantly, as many had anticipated, identifiably recent migrants. They were, as subsequent analyses showed, divided roughly equally between Bengali Muslims, Bengali Hindus, and other Hindus from various parts of India – a composition that satisfied virtually no political faction. The ruling BJP, which had championed the NRC exercise, declared the results unsatisfactory, believing that legitimate citizens had been excluded while many illegal migrants had been included. Indigenous advocacy groups felt the list was still too inclusive. Human rights organisations condemned the entire process as arbitrary and discriminatory.

As the University of Melbourne’s critical statelessness studies blog noted in a 2024 analysis, three interlocking institutions have created what researchers call a “zone of statelessness” in Assam: the Foreigners Tribunals, the Doubtful Voter (D-Voter) system – which has flagged approximately 96,000 people in the state’s electoral rolls as “doubtful” – and the NRC itself. Together, they have produced a population of nearly two million people living in permanent legal limbo, unable to fully access education, employment, property rights, or political representation.

The NRC process, meant to provide clarity, produced instead a new category of ambiguity — one that has since been exploited by political actors across the spectrum for their own ends.

Part VI: The Cold Numbers of Demographic Change

At the heart of Assam’s political anxiety is a demographic transformation that is real, measurable, and deeply contested in its causes and implications.

Census data reveals a striking arc. The Muslim population of Assam stood at just 9.22 percent in 1901. By 1951, in the immediate post-Partition period, it had risen to 24.68 percent. The 2011 Census – the most recent for which published data is available, as the 2021 Census has been delayed and is now expected only around 2027 – recorded the Muslim population at 34.22 percent of Assam’s total population of 31.2 million.

Brahmaputra: A History of Assam’s Climate Collapse -and What the River Still Remembers

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At the district level, the shifts are even more pronounced. In Dhubri, bordering Bangladesh, the Muslim population reached 79.67 percent by 2011. In Barpeta, the Hindu population had declined from 51.1 percent in 1971 to 29.11 percent by 2011. By the 2011 Census, nine of Assam’s 27 districts had Muslim-majority populations, up from six in 2001. The BJP has claimed that number has since risen to at least eleven, though without the verification that a new census would provide.

Demographers and scholars urge caution in accepting politically inflected demographic projections. The causes of the demographic shift are multiple and contested – they include differential fertility rates, the long historical legacy of colonial-era settlement policies, post-Partition population movements, economic migration driven by poverty, and, increasingly, climate-induced displacement. Disentangling these factors is enormously complex, and the absence of updated census data since 2011 has allowed speculation to flourish in the space where evidence should be.

What is not in dispute is that the demographic composition of the Brahmaputra Valley is changing, and that the indigenous Khilonjia communities – including the Assamese, Bodo, Mising, Rabha, Tiwa and dozens of other ethnic groups – feel, with increasing urgency, that their cultural survival is at stake.

Part VII: The Labor Vacuum and the Char Economy

There is a dimension of this story that receives far too little attention in the mainstream political discourse: the ecological and economic logic that drives settlement patterns in Assam’s most vulnerable zones.

The char lands – the riverine sandbars and islands that form and dissolve along the Brahmaputra’s shifting channels – are among the most precariously situated pieces of real estate in South Asia. They are chronically flood-prone, frequently inundated, and have no legally recognised tenure status. No bank will lend against char land; no government programme reliably reaches char communities; no school or hospital is permanently built there because the ground itself is impermanent.

And yet, hundreds of thousands of people live on the chars. They do so because the alternative – landlessness in a region where agricultural land is scarce and expensive – is even worse. The majority of char residents are Bengali-speaking Muslims, many of them descendants of generations of migrants, and many of them Indian citizens whose ancestors settled these flood-prone zones precisely because no one else wanted the land.

As indigenous Assamese communities have, over generations, moved away from the riverine agricultural economy – seeking urban employment, education, and safer ground – a labour vacuum has formed. It has been filled, as such vacuums historically are, by those with fewer options. In the process, communities that had no choice but to farm the chars have gained de facto – if legally tenuous – control over a significant portion of the state’s food-producing land in the highest-risk zones.

Climate Crisis Alert: How Global Warming is Destroying Sualkuchi (Assam)’s Priceless Muga, Eri, Pat Silk Legacy

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The result is a dynamic that is simultaneously humanitarian and politically explosive. When the state government conducts eviction drives – as it did dramatically in September 2024, when over 1,200 Muslim families of Bengali ethnicity were evicted from their homes and fields in Kamrup district in operations that left two people dead – it is simultaneously enforcing land law, responding to indigenous community anxieties about encroachment, and deepening the vulnerability of some of the most economically marginalised people in India.

Critics, including human rights organisations and opposition politicians, argue that these evictions – conducted without adequate resettlement plans – simply displace desperate people from one precarious situation to another, while doing nothing to address the structural causes of illegal land occupation.

Part VIII: The 2050 Horizon

The convergence of all these forces – glacial melt, sea-level rise, failed political architecture, demographic transformation, and ecological vulnerability – reaches its most alarming point when analysts attempt to model what Assam will look like in 2050.

The World Bank’s Groundswell projections suggest that, under a pessimistic scenario, nearly 20 million people could become internal climate migrants in Bangladesh alone by mid-century. Even under a more optimistic, climate-friendly development scenario, that figure is projected to exceed 13.3 million. Some portion of that movement – impossible to quantify with precision but almost certainly significant, given the historical patterns of cross-border movement and the proximity of Assam to the most climate-vulnerable regions of Bangladesh – will seek to cross into Assam.

At the same time, Assam’s own internal climate displacement will intensify. If Eastern Himalayan glaciers lose 60 to 75 percent of their ice volume by century’s end – as multiple scientific projections now suggest – the Brahmaputra’s flood and erosion patterns will become dramatically more extreme in the near term before potentially diminishing in the longer term as glacial water sources are depleted. The window of peak flood risk – when glacial melt is most intense – coincides almost precisely with the period in which Bangladesh’s sea-level and agricultural crises will be at their most acute.

Without a comprehensive, data-driven regional policy framework – one that can distinguish between internal environmental refugees, cross-border climate migrants, and politically motivated illegal settlement; one that provides genuine protection for indigenous cultural rights while respecting the humanitarian claims of displaced populations – Assam will be caught between forces it has neither the institutional capacity nor the political will to manage.

The indigenous identity of the Brahmaputra Valley, which has survived centuries of invasion, colonialism, and political upheaval, now faces its most complex existential test. It is a test that is simultaneously ecological, demographic, legal, and deeply, achingly human.

Part IX: What Must Be Done

The outline of a rational response to Assam’s triple-axis crisis is not entirely obscure, even if the political will to pursue it has been conspicuously absent.

First, climate science must drive land policy. The state and central governments must develop a comprehensive, satellite-monitored riverbank erosion and flood-risk mapping system, updated in real time, that can identify which areas of Assam are becoming permanently uninhabitable and prioritise their residents – regardless of ethnicity or religion – for managed resettlement and livelihood support. The Rs 200 crore annual economic loss from floods and erosion is a minimum estimate; the true cost of inaction is orders of magnitude higher.

Second, the NRC must be resolved, not weaponised. Nearly seven years after the publication of the final NRC, 1.9 million people remain in a state of legal limbo – unable to fully access citizenship rights, but not formally deported. This legal uncertainty is a human rights crisis and a political powder keg. A credible, transparent, and rights-respecting appeals process must be concluded. Statelessness on this scale benefits no one except those who profit from permanent political grievance.

Third, Clause 6 of the Assam Accord must be implemented in its original spirit. The clause’s promise of constitutional and legislative safeguards for the cultural, social, linguistic, and land rights of the Indigenous Assamese people has sat dormant for four decades. A high-powered committee submitted its report in 2020; its recommendations have been largely shelved. Implementing meaningful protections for indigenous land rights, language, and political representation is not optional – it is the foundation on which any durable social compact in Assam must be built.

Fourth, India and Bangladesh must develop a bilateral climate migration framework. This is, admittedly, the most politically difficult recommendation – but also, ultimately, the most important. The climate crisis does not respect national borders. A managed, legal, and rights-respecting framework for acknowledging and processing climate-induced cross-border movement is infinitely preferable to the chaotic, criminalised, and politically exploited reality of irregular migration that currently exists.

Fifth, the Eastern Himalayan glacier crisis must be treated as a national security emergency. The melting of the glaciers that feed the Brahmaputra is not a distant ecological concern; it is an immediate threat to the water security, agricultural stability, and physical safety of millions of people in Northeast India. Accelerated investment in GLOF early-warning systems, river management infrastructure, and long-term climate adaptation – at a scale commensurate with the threat – is urgently required.

In the reed-thatched homes of Majuli,  or  in the flood-damaged markets of Dhubri, in the detention centres of Goalpara, and in the climate refugee settlements of coastal Bangladesh where families quietly plan their next move northward, the same existential question echoes: Who will be left, and for whom?

Assam’s crisis is not the story of villains and victims it is so often made to appear – the illegal immigrant against the indigenous citizen, the migrant against the host community. It is the story of multiple, overlapping vulnerabilities produced by planetary forces and political failures that intersect in one of the most geographically and culturally extraordinary regions on Earth.

The Brahmaputra Valley did not create global climate change. It did not cause the Partition of 1947, the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, or the policy failures of New Delhi across many decades. But it is paying – and will continue to pay – a disproportionate price for all of them.

Unless the governments of India and Bangladesh, the international climate community, and Assam’s own fractious political class find the will to treat this crisis with the seriousness it demands – with data, with policy, with justice, and with something approaching wisdom – there is a very real danger that what makes the Brahmaputra Valley distinctive, irreplaceable, and alive will vanish.

Not through force. Through neglect.

Sources: UNEP, World Bank Groundswell Report (2021), NASA Sea Level Data (2024), ICIMOD Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment (2023), Migration Policy Institute (2024), Amnesty International India, Assam Government NRC Data, Indian Parliamentary Records (Lok Sabha), Frontiers in Earth Science (2025), Mongabay India, India TV News, The Sentinel Assam, Census of India (2011), Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (2023), Wilson Center, European Parliament Climate Migration Brief.

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