The Better India · 21 hours ago

This Assam Man Turned Annual Floods Into Fish Farming for 300+ Families

In Assam's flood-prone Sribhumi district, Nazrul Haque made a decision that seemed counterintuitive to everyone around him: rather than fight the water that drowned his family's crops each monsoon, he chose to farm it. What began with a single hectare yielding barely seven quintals of fish quietly grew into a 100-hectare operation and, more remarkably, a village transformation - every one of Alekhargul's 300-plus households now connected to fish farming or fish trading. Nazrul's method was as deliberate as it was generous: he ran demonstrations on his own land, helped neighbors access loans, and handed out first batches of fingerlings to families who had nothing to stake. Among those he reached was Sriratan, a 58-year-old farmer who had taken on debt for years watching floods erase his harvests, and who had quietly considered ending his life before a neighbor carried Nazrul's message to him. "I have earned nearly a lakh in three months," Sriratan says now - an amount, he adds, that he had only ever imagined - a quiet measure of how much can change when one person decides that what everyone else endures might instead be used.