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Hoglatari (Bengal): At dawn, the sound came first, a roar that seemed to tear the sky apart. Within minutes, a wall of water surged through Bamandanga village in Jalpaiguri’s Nagrakata block, uprooting homes, trees, and soild at once.

“I was born on the banks of the Jaldhaka and have lived here all my life. Never have I seen such floods,” narrated Sadhu Roy, one of the oldest residents of Hoglatari village in Jalpaiguri.

Sadhu Roy at Hoglatari. Photo: Joydeep Sarkar.

Staring at the crater where his fields once lay, he described the day that devastated North Bengal. Floods on October 9 killed 40 people in the region. “I heard a horrific sound – like an explosion. A torrent of water, like an arrowhead, rushed in and ravaged our village. Pucca houses, coconut trees and betel-nut trees – everything was uprooted.”

Disaster has become the new normal across North Bengal. From the bursting of Sikkim’s Teesta dam to relentless rainfall cascading from Bhutan, the Himalayan foothills have been struggle with ecological distress with the past two years.

What struck the plains of North Bengal this time was no act of nature alone. According to ecology experts, it was the predictable outcome of a Himalayan ecosystem pushed past its limits due to unregulated construction, reckless river mining, and the political capture of environmental governance.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, during her visit to the flood-ravaged Bamandanga village, shifted the blame to Bhutan’s excess water discharge.

Surveying the village, which was........

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