Voluntary relief distribution to flood-affected people in Assam’s worst-hit Sivasagar, Charaideo, Golaghat, and Jorhat districts by Good Samaritans is a community-driven compassion that helps fill critical gaps in official institutional support during this hour of crisis. A public health crisis looms over flood-hit areas, with decaying carcasses of livestock and stagnant water raising the risk of disease outbreak after floodwater recedes and people start returning homes from makeshift relief camps. Mineral water bottles are one of the major relief items in both official and community-driven relief material distribution, as villages and towns ravaged by floods are facing an acute shortage of safe drinking water. Apart from plastic water bottles, the number of single-use plastic carry bags, in which relief materials are packed, has surged in flood-hit areas. The sudden surge in SUPs calls for special attention to plastic waste management in flood-affected areas from the very beginning to prevent it from snowballing into a monumental problem. The trauma of affected people after unprecedented floods has left a trail of devastation, destroying their paddy fields and filling their houses, compounds, and roads with silt; it is too deep to allow them to concentrate on plastic or other waste management when the vast majority of them are still clueless how to rebuild their lives. While it may sound too early to talk about plastic waste management when relief materials are yet to reach people in some of the interior submerged villages, allowing plastic to accumulate will only raise the risk of worse inundation in flood-prone villages and give rise to the problem of waterlogging in urban areas. Lessons must be learnt from the experiences of Guwahati, Dibrugarh and several other towns where the irresponsible dumping of plastic water bottles and SUP carry bags in drains chokes the drainage network, blocking the water channels and giving rise to recurring waterlogging problems. Relief distribution teams are making arrangements to collect the plastic carry bags after handing over the relief materials and handing those over to waste processing units or plastic waste collectors. Such teams helping affected villagers put in place large bins in their neighbourhoods to facilitate the dumping of plastic water bottles and plastic carry bags can go a long way in making it a community-driven initiative to curb the plastic menace in flood-hit areas. As the monsoon season will last until October, recurrence of more waves of floods striking these and other districts remains a strong possibility. On the part of local authorities, cleaning the drainage network and clearing all natural stormwater channels on a war footing are essential responsibilities to minimise recurrent flooding. People in affected areas inculcating the habit of responsible disposal of SUPs is critical to increasing flood resilience by preventing the plastic menace from blocking natural and engineered stormwater drainage systems. Apart from the carry bags, plastic packets used to make smaller packets of dry rations like rice, salt, pulses, etc. have surged, compounding the plastic waste challenge in inundated areas. Mere putting in place the arrangement to collect SUPs at designated bins may not ensure total removal of plastic waste in flood-hit areas. Without integrating an efficient system of processing into plastic waste collection, the risk of collected plastic wastes finding their way into water channels cannot be ruled out. A pragmatic solution to the mounting plastic waste management problem is channelling the collected waste into the construction of rural roads under the flagship Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY). The “Vision Document on New Technology Initiatives Guidelines-2022”, issued by the Ministry of Rural Development, mandates that the States and Union Territories compulsorily use waste plastic in at least 70% of the eligible proposed length involving the Hot Mix process in PMGSY roads. While constructing roads using this technology, plastic carry bags, wrappers, and packets are shredded into small pieces and mixed with hot bitumen to be used in the construction of the top layer of the PMGSY roads. The central government told the Lok Sabha that seven institutes, supervised by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, evaluated rural roads made with waste plastic and found that problems like surface wear, cracks, and potholes were much less common than in regular roads. Pavement Condition Index (PCI) values for waste plastic roads were found higher, indicating better overall surface condition, and the analysis further showed that the maintenance of these roads can generally be deferred by about one year and that there is a marginal reduction in overall life cycle cost compared to conventional roads, the government told the Lok Sabha. It requires a collective effort by the communities and the government to leverage such a provision in reconstruction of the roads in flood-hit areas. The Assam Pollution Control Board can take the initiative to develop a plastic waste management protocol, especially for flood-hit areas, to channelise post-disaster plastic wastes into resilient rural road construction.