Analyzing Riverbank Erosion and Socio-economic Conditions of Sadiya, Assam, India

Lateral movement of river causing shifting and erosion is one of the common geomorphic phenomenon in any alluvial river system. However, the magnitude and rate of shifting is different from river to river. In this paper an attempt has been made to analyze the socioeconomic conditions such as education, school dropout, house type, sanitation, income pattern, occupational structure within and outside the Historical Migration Zone (HMZ) of Sadiya region, Assam. The Historical Migration Zone (HMZ) is the collective area the channel occupied in the historical time framework. A cross-sectional methodology using simple random sampling has been applied in this study. To investigate this problem, a field investigation was conducted for 40 villages and 1,055 households were surveyed during 2015–2016. The villages were divided equally, with 20 located within and 20 outside the HMZ and secondary sources of data have been used to support the statements. During the study, some of the major findings can be observed in HMZ are high illiteracy rate (20.64%), school dropout (48.29%), earthen house (18.9 %), non-access to toilet (16.5%), and large proportion of people (5.71%) does not engage in any definite occupation. The study can be very fruitful for policy makers to adopt sustainable development and conservation in spite of limitations such as absence of pre-erosion baseline data, village-level exposure classification, and age of the survey data limit causal interpretation.