The Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC) intensifying cleaning the drains to mitigate urban flooding is a routine exercise witnessed during rainy days. City residents responding to the appeal by the GMC authorities not to dump plastic and waste in drains is critical to deriving optimal benefits from the intensified cleanliness drive. Without enforcement of prohibition on hill cutting, segregating garbage at source, and GMC ensuring segregated collection of garbage door-to-door, a sustainable solution to the problem will continue to elude, and nobody can predict how long. Construction of a new drainage network with covered manholes is a correct approach, but long delays in construction work have left most drains in different city localities uncovered. Irresponsible city residents and floating visitors dump plastic bottles and other solid wastes into the drains or dump near the drains by the roadside, which ultimately find their way into those. Expeditious completion of the drain construction and ensuring that every single manhole is secured need to be prioritised along with regular desilting and cleaning operations. The oversight mechanism of the GMC for cleaning work is very poor, due to which corporation workers engaged by contractors for cleaning the drains continue to leave silt near the roadside for days together in some areas despite strict instruction by the authorities. As a result, a portion of the silt removed from the drains during intensified cleaning operations is carried back to the drains by rainwater. Entrusting the responsibility to keep a vigil on the cleanliness drive to find out if the GMC workers have been strictly adhering to the instruction to remove the silt collected from the drains the same day can strengthen the oversight mechanism. Their action role in it will also encourage local residents and business owners and other establishments to play their part and promptly bring to the notice of the respective elected representatives whenever any deviation from the norm is observed. Currently, the exercise remains a purely administrative exercise with no role being played by residents or their representatives. The GMC needs to undertake a comprehensive survey of all drains receiving surface water runoff from the city hills and if all the confluence points have effective silt traps or not. More scientific studies need to be undertaken towards finding an effective design of the silt trap at every single confluence of stormwater drains from the hills and drains in the plains to reduce the flow of siltation in the drains. As hill cutting has become rampant with more houses being built after encroachment and clearing of tree cover, not just the drains from the hills, silt is carried by stormwater along the hill slopes, which gets carried to roads during heavy rains, which ultimately find their way into the roadsides. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has predicted extremely heavy rain, thunderstorms and lightning, squalls, etc., till Friday across Assam and Meghalaya. The cleaned drains will again be filled with silt if the city also receives heavy rains continuously. The Assam State Disaster Management Authority has advised the people living in the identified landslide-prone vulnerable areas of the state to shift themselves to the safe shelters (relief camps) or other safer places of their choice in the wake of the alert issued by the MHA. Temporary shifting is crucial for saving lives, but finding a permanent and sustainable solution has become an urgent necessity so that men and material deployed in relief and rescue operations in manmade disasters can be better utilised in mitigating risks in natural disasters like floods, erosion and earthquakes. The permanent solution to the problem is enforcing the ban on hill cutting and preventing encroachment, but the authorities forget the issues once the rainy season is over. Ironically, rising fatalities during landslides that recur in monsoon months in the city hills also do not deter people from felling trees, cutting the slopes and constructing houses, which have made the hills more vulnerable and susceptible to landslides. Segregation of household and institutional waste also needs to be prioritised and incorporated into the systems so that city residents play their part in scientific waste management. Lessons must be learnt from Indore Municipal Corporation, which has institutionalised segregation of wastes at source in residential and business establishment compounds and collection of such wastes by corporation workers in vans with segregated compartments. Once waste gets collected in a systematic manner, there will be no scope for dumping plastic bottles and other solid waste into the drains or water waterbodies and even if someone tries to do that, they can be easily caught and punished. As a significant number of people in Guwahati currently indulge in such irresponsible practices, the GMC, with limited manpower, finds it difficult to check. The reforms in city waste management are long overdue and require urgent policy intervention if the city is to remain sustainable and liveable.