Assam floods kill 100+, with mining blamed for 'man-made disaster'

Along the river valleys of Assam, where monsoon and mountain have always negotiated their ancient terms, something has shifted in the balance. In July 2026, three days of rain sent the Dikhow and its tributaries crashing through more than 2,700 villages, killing over a hundred people and uprooting nearly 700,000 more — a scale of suffering that residents and researchers alike refuse to call merely natural. For years, stone and coal extraction has hollowed out riverbeds and stripped hillsides of the forests that once slowed and absorbed the rains; what poured through those villages was not simp