Flash floods in Guwahati after a few hours of heavy downpours have become a recurring event. Resultant problems, not solutions, dominating the discourse around it can lead us nowhere. Solutions, short-term, medium-term, and long-term, are needed to keep the city sustainable. Erratic and heavy rainfall within a small window period has become a regular phenomenon. City planning cannot be delinked from extreme weather events like heavy downpours, and storm water drainage needs a complete overhaul. For a busy city like Guwahati, the structural overhaul of the drainage network cannot be taken up in one go and needs to be implemented in phases. Modern equipment used for construction work makes it possible to expedite execution if it is planned meticulously. Bitter experiences of city residents over the unplanned laying of water pipes and pipelines for piped gas supplies causing immense hardship in daily commutes from residence to workplace, businesses, and marketplaces need to be kept in mind while planning and executing plans for decongesting the city or addressing the flash flood problem. Unfortunately, the construction works have been undertaken without notifying the residents of different localities, due to which citizens are clueless as to when their streets and by-lanes that have been dug are going to be repaired and restored to their original stage. Keeping city residents outside the loop of projects has widened the gap between them and the city authorities. This has constrained the space for consultation between the authorities and residents, leaving the citizens to doubt if projects like new storm water drainage are going to address the flash flood problem. The consultation process is also necessary to create an environment that motivates the residents to wonder how they can contribute to reducing the intensity of flash floods. Rainwater harvesting as one of the multi-pronged solutions to Guwahati’s flash flood problem seldom finds space in the public discourse, even though the city residents can be the biggest stakeholder in this solution. The rapid rise in population and commercial activities to cater to their socio-economic needs has caused Guwahati to grow both vertically and horizontally. Growth in the real estate industry has also led to the conversion of residential plots owned by individual families into high-rise, multi-storeyed apartments. Building bylaws require the provision of rainwater harvesting so that the volume of water from these residential campuses to drains in their locality and run-off rainwater can be checked. In practice, however, the opposite is the hard reality. The plinth area of most of the individual houses, buildings, and multi-story apartments is raised much above the road height, and the courtyard space is paved, due to which rainwater instead of being absorbed by the courtyard surface runs off to the street. Most of the courtyards do not have trees, which could have retained some amount of rainfall. Even though building bylaws make tree plantations within the campus mandatory, no trees are to be found in a large number of residential or commercial buildings. Why these building norms are not enforced when they were inserted after considering the importance of rainwater harvesting or tree plantation in addressing the flash flood problem in the city is baffling to anyone who takes a closer look at the problem and the solutions. Ironically, city residents have also ignored the importance of looking at their courtyards as rainwater catchments. Even when many residents reel under a water crisis, they would still prefer to buy water supplied by a private tanker instead of creating a rainwater harvesting system, even to meet non-drinking water needs such as car washing, watering plants, and washing. The terraces of buildings catch copious quantities of rainwater, which can be easily stored in a water tank and used for these purposes. Doing this can help achieve two objectives simultaneously, reducing demand for underground water supplied by private water tankers or lifted by themselves with the help of submersible water pumps, and reducing the volume of water from individual campuses to the street and drains during the rainy days. Rainwater harvesting is not going to provide relief from flash floods, as the volume of rainwater run-off from the hill slopes is much greater, but it could at least improve the water-carrying capacity of the drainage system and reduce the water accumulation on the streets. Improvements in the storm-water drainage system with silt traps and other technological solutions will eventually reduce the rainwater runoff from the hills on the city streets, but without rainwater harvesting systems in residential and commercial complexes, rainwater will continue to runoff to the streets and drains. Refocusing the public discourse on the flash flood in Guwahati from the perspective of citizens’ role and participation in the solution-evolving process is the urgent need of the hour. Active role of citizens in solution implementation instead of keeping engaged only in discussing problems can also contribute to finding out new frameworks for urban flood management and disaster management.