Drowning in Denial: India’s Failing Climate Response in the Northeast

The catastrophic floods and landslides which have again inundated huge parts of India’s northeastern states are not only natural calamities, they are a reflection of an underlying crisis of governance, abandonment, and climate failure. At least 30 lives were lost in June 2025, thousands were evacuated, and cities such as Guwahati were brought to a standstill for days, as heavy monsoon rains lashed Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, and Mizoram. This was not a one-off incident. It was a sign of an increasingly predictable trend of extreme weather, made worse by poor planning and a perilously slow climate response from the Indian state.

Climate experts have warned of India’s northeast vulnerability for years, an ecologically vulnerable region scarred by vulnerable hill systems, over-exploited rivers, and unregulated, spontaneous urbanization. Little has changed, however. Instead, unimplemented infrastructure projects, hill-cutting without restraint, floodplain encroachments, and diluted disaster preparedness drive the damage in larger and more severe ways. The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) may be on paper, but its capacity to pre-empt, mitigate, or successfully respond to such catastrophes remains very questionable.

In Mizoram alone, over 675 landslides were documented in the span of six months. Assam has had thousands of people displaced year after year. With every monsoon, roads disappear, bridges are washed away, and whole villages are severed from basic services. And yet, the governments at both the state and center level still approach these catastrophes as episodic events and not signs of systemic failure in adaptation to climate. India’s highly trumpeted climate policy, and its undertakings under the Paris Agreement, sound hollow in the light of these repeated domestic failures.

The truth is bleak. One of the nation’s most vulnerable to the climate crisis, India has done nothing to climate-proof its most vulnerable areas. The northeast, being a region already peripheral in terms of political focus and economic growth, is suffering the cost of this lack of attention in its land, houses, and lives. Cities such as Guwahati are still subsiding under even low rainfall because of clogged drains, unregulated construction, and lack of urban planning. The same drainage and river management issues repeat every year, but budgetary decisions, local capacity development, and structural changes are nowhere to be found.

Further, the Indian Supreme Court has repeatedly warned against illegal hill-cutting and building on risky slopes. Enforcement on the ground is nearly non-existent, however. Under-staffed and under-equipped State Disaster Response Forces are left scrambling to evacuate individuals only after the event. No genuine effort is made to overhaul the way land use is governed, the way urbanization is handled, or the way climate resilience is incorporated into regional planning.

The political leadership in New Delhi has, for the most part, preferred climate diplomacy over domestic climate governance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speeches at global climate forums often emphasize India’s “green credentials” and renewable energy targets. But these optics do little for those living in bamboo shelters in flood-hit Lakhimpur, or for families grieving in landslide-prone Lunglei. The distance between India’s global reputation and its national performance is widening, and nowhere is this gap more palpable than in the northeast.

Why this crisis is so alarming is that it is predictable. India has plenty of data, know-how, and satellite forecasting ability. But early warning systems are patchy, interagency coordination is poor, and local climate adaptation funding is still lacking. Disaster management in India is still reactive, rather than preventative.

The northeast should do better. It should not only be rescued with relief camps and rescue missions, but it should receive proactive investment in flood protection, green urban design, and ecological renewal. It should have a climate policy based on justice, equity, and accountability, not photo-ops and agency paralysis.

India’s climate emergency is no longer a hypothetical menace, it is happening in real-time, and its border is drowning. Until the Indian state makes resilience the priority over rhetoric, its northeast will be stuck in a cycle of disaster and abandonment. The floods of 2025 are not a failure of weather, rather, they are a failure of will.