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Assam floods: UAE expats raise Dh35,000, return home to help devastated communities
On August 4, Boruah and Bordoloi boarded an Air India Express flight to Guwahati from Dubai, the first direct flight between the two cities, carrying relief materials
- PUBLISHED: Thu 13 Aug 2026, 11:10 AM
As a child, Utpal Boruah, a long-time UAE resident, learned to live with floods. Having grown up in Majuli, the world's largest inhabited freshwater island, which bears the brunt of the raging Brahmaputra every monsoon, the Indian expat from Assam knew how to predict floods from a very young age.
“If the river rose even by an inch, we could tell roughly how many days it would take before the water entered our village. We could see the signs and understand what was coming,” the Dubai-based insurance professional recalled.
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The villagers would build raised platforms and temporary houses to survive the onslaught.
“We would also prepare raised sheds for our cattle and make arrangements to keep our cows and goats safe from the water,” he said.
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“From a young age, we saw for ourselves how to live when the water rose and what needed to be done once the floodwaters receded. We grew up experiencing all of it and, more importantly, learning to share and help one another through it.”
But nothing could have prepared Boruah for the heart-wrenching images and videos that emerged from recent floods, which caught thousands of people off guard in the Sivasagar, Charaideo, Golaghat and Jorhat districts of Assam.
Sitting here in Dubai, Boruah felt helpless as more than 100 people lost their lives and more than 100,000 were affected by the deluge, including in villages that had never been known as flood-prone areas.
After the first wave of water turned lives upside down on July 19, the Assam government blamed it on a cloudburst in the neighbouring state of Nagaland.
But the India Meteorological Department soon debunked the cloudburst theory, leading to media debates over the possible role of deforestation in the hills.
Amid the torrent of allegations and counter-allegations, what did not stop was the rising level of the water, crippling the lives of ordinary people with each passing day.
Unable to bear the pain from the catastrophic scenes, Boruah and two of his friends — Sumon Bordoloi and Prateek Talukdar — from the Assamese community in the UAE decided to raise funds for the flood victims.
Within days of starting the initiative, Assamese expats came forward with generous donations, helping Boruah, Bordoloi and Talukdar raise more than Dh35,000 in just 10 days.
“There are only around 300 to 400 Assamese people in the UAE, including children. So, the fact that we were able to raise 35,000 within 10 days from such a small community is a really big achievement for us,” said Talukdar, a Dubai resident.
“We are grateful to every single person in the UAE who came forward, contributed and helped us support the people back home in Assam.”
On August 4, Boruah and Bordoloi boarded the Air India Express flight to Guwahati from Dubai, the first direct flight between the two cities, carrying relief materials with them.
They were joined by a group of former UAE residents in Guwahati before they travelled to the worst-affected villages in upper Assam.
“We mostly gave out school bags and relief packages. The school supplies included notebooks, pens, pencils, drawing materials and other basic stationery items. We decided to give school bags and other essential items because hundreds of schools were destroyed by the flood,” Boruah said.
“We also provided pressure cookers, medical, sanitary and hygiene kits. These included sanitary products for girls and women, bedding, toothbrushes, soap and other essential hygiene items.”
For Bordoloi, witnessing the situation first-hand was an experience he could never put into words.
“We met a few people in a village who were living in a temporary tent. They said that when the floodwaters first arrived, one of the young boys rushed to the field to bring back his tractor. He never returned,” Bordoloi said.
Visiting those villages, Boruah realised the situation was nothing like what he experienced as a child in flood-prone Majuli.
“I have never seen anything like this. For a flood to become this severe, it has to be something else — something like a tsunami. That is why the situation has become so bad,” he said.
“The houses are simply gone. The houses that were there, even the temporary structures, have been completely wiped out. In some places, you can see only the foundations. There is hardly anything left.”
Boruah said complete recovery was going to take a lot of time.
“I would say it could take us around two months for the children to get back to school. There is a lot of reconstruction and other work that needs to be done, and it cannot happen overnight. It will take some time,” he said.
Swapnanil Baruah, a retired bureaucrat from Assam, appealed to the government to redesign relief camp management.
“Temporary classrooms should ensure that children’s education is not interrupted. Relief camps must provide dignity as well as survival,” Baruah wrote in his column for the Assam Tribune.
But Talukdar, who is also a professional bodybuilder, doesn’t expect the political class to rise above its own agendas to help people.
“The scale of this flood was unprecedented even for a flood-prone state like Assam. But I don’t expect anything from our leaders because they have refused to learn from past experiences,” he said.
What was heartwarming for Boruah was to see ordinary people and NGOs from different parts of India come forward to help.
“While travelling through the affected areas, we saw the destruction along the roads, but we also saw people trying to help each other,” he said.
“Even in such difficult circumstances, people were coming forward and supporting one another. To see that spirit in people amid such a crisis is truly unforgettable.”
Rituraj Borkakoty is Sports Editor and has spent more than two decades writing on his sporting heroes. He also loves an underdog story, so if you have one, share it with him. He would love to bring it to life.