The piece reflects on how Guwahati’s rapid urban growth is erasing its hills, wetlands and beels that once absorbed monsoon rains.
As glass towers and housing blocks rise, natural drainage is choked, causing so‑called “artificial floods.”
Citing Silsako and Deepor Beel, the author urges a 2045 vision that treats nature as infrastructure essential to the city’s survival.
The other day I was driving down G.S. Road and realised I couldn’t see the hills of Guwahati.
That sounds ridiculous because, obviously, the hills haven’t disappeared. But there are stretches now where the horizon is just gone, hidden behind glass showrooms, apartment blocks, and the skeletal frames of half-finished construction sites. They’re still there, of course, but they’re being sliced into for “viewpoint” homes or slowly buried behind concrete.
Sometimes, I wonder how much of a hill you can cut away before we simply stop remembering what the original skyline even looked like.
And it isn’t only the hills we’re losing; it’s the low-lying places too: the fields, the marshes, and the wetlands that gave the water somewhere to go.
As children, we didn’t think of them as “wetlands” or “stormwater reservoirs.” They were just the places where the water lived. We knew the fields would turn into mirrors after a heavy monsoon downpour, but we didn’t realise those messy, overgrown patches were doing some of the most important work in the city. They were just giving the rain somewhere to go.
These days, the rain comes with a peculiar kind of anxiety. When heavy rain falls across the hills, you can almost predict what happens next: The Bharalu and the Bahini rivers begin to choke on silt, plastic and sewage, the roads vanish, and the city just stops. Sometimes it takes less than an hour of rain to turn a commute into a rescue mission.
We call these “artificial floods,” which is an odd phrase when you think about it. The water isn’t appearing from nowhere. For decades, we have filled in the beels (oxbow lakes), built over the low-lying hollows, and narrowed many of the natural channels we had. The water isn’t “artificial”, it’s just coming back to where it used to live.
Look at Silsako Beel. The government now describes it as a vital reservoir, but its history is a tragedy of subtraction. It went from around 450 acres to just 80 by 2021. Now, we are seeing these massive, painful eviction drives to reclaim that land. It’s a strange reversal: We spent decades filling these natural sponges, and now we’re spending crores of public money trying to dig them back out.
Then there is Deepor Beel, Assam’s only Ramsar site. It’s supposed to be a sanctuary for elephants and migratory birds, a piece of the landscape that existed long before the city did. Yet, the numbers tell a different story. A 2025 study found that around 22 hectares of its water spread is being lost to urbanisation every decade. Between the railway line cutting through its heart and the years of pollution from the Boragaon landfill, Deepor is a reminder of how easily we neglect the things that quietly keep us alive.
I think we tend to look at hills and wetlands as “scenery”, nice to look at, perhaps useful for tourism, but ultimately secondary to “progress.”
The reality is that Guwahati has to grow.
We need the housing, the business hubs, and the new flyovers, nobody is arguing for the city to stay stuck in the 1990s. The draft Master Plan 2045 is an ambitious look at where we’re headed, and it’s encouraging to see the idea of “natural infrastructure” entering the conversation. But the challenge is that nature doesn’t look like “infrastructure” in a way that’s easy to celebrate. A wetland doing its job doesn’t make for much of an inauguration. Neither does a hillside that has simply been left alone.
We only notice these things when they stop working…when the hill washes down onto the road or when the beels can no longer hold the runoff.
I want Guwahati to be a modern, thriving capital, but I hope we’re learning that development doesn’t have to mean defeat for the landscape. We need to find a way to let the city expand without burying the very things that keep it habitable. By the time 2045 rolls around, Guwahati will look vastly different and I hope it does. I want the city to grow. I just hope that somewhere along the way, we don’t lose the things that made it possible to live here in the first place.
I hope we can still look up at the end of the street and see the hills. And when the rain comes, I hope we’ve finally left the water enough room to move.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth