A comprehensive flood-management program should revolve around improving flood-coping mechanisms and flood-preparedness. Some key areas that must be addressed in India include sustaining and improving natural systems’ ability to absorb floodwaters; improving dam management, and instituting clearly defined and transparent operating rules that are stringently enforced; improving the maintenance of existing flood infrastructure rather than spending money on new dams and embankments; undertaking a credible performance appraisal of existing infrastructure in a participatory way, and removing embankments that are found to be ineffective; and producing transparent disaster management plans intended to be implemented in a participatory way. Perhaps most importantly, India needs to assess the potential impacts of climate change on rainfall and on the performance of flood-related infrastructure, and begin planning for the necessary adaptation to the changing climate.

In addition, the two following programs, both of which are already being tried in India, deserve much wider implementation:
River Basin friends: People-driven flood forecasting The River Basin Friends is a people’s network of  more than 300 organizations located in the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin. Official flood forecasting from the central government is often insufficient to predict impacts at the local level, and the information cannot usually reach people in vulnerable locations. So River Basin Friends began its own initiative to commence an early flood warning mechanism which reaches people all the way downstream in Bangladesh. It has more than 1,000 members of different disciplines, living in different parts of the basin, each of whom helps circulate flood forecasting messages from upstream locations to downstream locations, using phones and email. People in the central hub in Assam collect information from different sources, and the peoples’ network in upstream locations of the Brahmaputra basin process and analyze it.

The final flood early warning messages are then formulated for different vulnerable locations and disseminated to these locations. This has been going on quite effectively at least for the last three years. More in-depth study of this remarkable initiative needs to be done, as it has the potential to provide lessons for many other communities.

Groundwater Recharging to Manage Floods: The Central Ground Water Board of the Government of India completed a study that estimates the additional groundwater resources that could be available by arresting the surplus monsoon run-off and storing in sub-surface aquifers. The salient features of the plan are:
« The estimated surplus monsoon run-off in India's 20 river basins is864.7 billion cubic meters (BCM). It would be possible to create surplus potential storage of 59.06 million hectares by saturating the aquifer. Out of this storage, it would be possible to retrieve 436.4 BCM.
« However, on the basis of the available surplus monsoon run-off, which is not uniform in time and space, the ground water storage that could be feasible has been estimated as 214.2 BCM, of which about 160 BCM is considered retrievable; and
« The above resource could be harnessed to create an irrigation potential of 32 million hectares.2 Reduction of even a fraction of this quantity of 214.2 BCM from the rivers during floods would have  tremendous impact on the floods in the river basins. However, there has been no attempt to realize this potential. The Government of India’s Finance Minister in February 2007 proposed spending US$419 million on a new groundwater recharge scheme. It remains to be seen how the scheme will be formulated, how it would be implemented and what is the impact. In conclusion, there is mounting evidence that structural measures have been largely ineffective in its claims of controlling floods, and in fact, have worsened flooding in many parts of the country.

Yet the state and national governments in India – with support by international agencies like the
World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the Japanese Bank for International Cooperation – is pushing for more, not less of the same structural solutions. The opportunity provided by the report of the World Commission on Dams in reviewing planning and decision-making frameworks for large dams appears to have been completely lost on India's water managers. The people, however, are fighting against such measures in a number of places. One notable example is growing opposition to building embankments in Bihar. The mounting opposition to India’s River Linking Plans is another indication of this trend. SANDRP has called for a national, independent enquiry into the issue of flooding in India during the 2006 monsoon, especially with regards to sudden releases from dams. We are calling for more transparency in dam operations, and a review of operating procedures. We hope that public pressure from these various campaigns, along with the good example of initiatives like people-centered flood forecasting and groundwater recharge projects, will help lead India toward a more sensible approach to floods.