Dibrugarh: The Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuba Chatra Parishad (AJYCP) on Monday held a three-hour sit-in demonstration at every district headquarters across Assam, demanding that the Centre declare the state’s recurring flood and erosion crisis a national disaster.In Dibrugarh and Tinsukia, two of the districts worst affected by riverbank erosion along the Brahmaputra, the protest drew large participation from AJYCP cadres and supporters.AJYCP Dibrugarh district president Udayan Baruah said the organisation’s patience with successive govts ranout. “Every year thousands of families lose their homes, farmland and livelihoods to floods and erosion, yet the Centre continues to treat this as a routine, local problem. This is nothing short of a national calamity and it must be declared one,” he said.The organisation’s charter of demands, read out at each protest site, centred on four key points. First, AJYCP demanded that the Centre formally declare Assam’s annual floods and erosion problem a national disaster, which would unlock greater central funding and a coordinated disaster-response framework.Second, it called for a permanent and scientifically designed solution to the crisis, rather than the temporary embankment repairs that have characterised flood management in the state for decades.Third, the group demanded a complete waiver of agricultural loans for farmers whose crops and land have been destroyed by floods and erosion.Fourth, it sought adequate and timely compensation for all flood- and erosion-affected people across the state, arguing that existing relief packages remain grossly insufficient compared to the scale of loss suffered year after year.At the Tinsukia demonstration, a senior AJYCP functionary said the sit-in was the first phase of a larger agitation. “If the govt fails to respond within a reasonable time frame, we will be compelled to intensify our movement in the coming days,” he said.
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