Assam district heads asked to assess extent of forestland encroachment

Assam’s District Commissioners have been instructed to assess the extent of encroachment on forestlands, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said on Friday, (August 1, 2025).

He said the State government would try to evict all people, barring tribals and forest dwellers covered by the Forest Rights Act, from the jungles.

“Tribal people living in forest areas from before 2005 can continue to stay, but we will evict others not eligible to live in forests,” he told journalists in Guwahati.

The Chief Minister said the level of encroachment, encouraged by some previous regimes, had been high and beyond imagination. “The exercise will take at least 10 years to complete even if we carry out one eviction drive per month,” he said.

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government undertook the first eviction drive, following a Gauhati High Court order, in 2016. The second drive was carried out in 2021.

Resumed in June, the eviction drive in several districts, including Dhubri, Goalpara, Golaghat and Lakhimpur, has left more than 50,000 people, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims, homeless.

Mr. Sarma, however, said evicting encroachers alone would not solve the problem of people occupying government lands illegally. “Today, we carried out an eviction drive in Orang [National Park] after some people tried to occupy vacated land,” he said.

He said the government planned to lease out vacant spaces to cooperatives of indigenous people at a token rate of ₹1 or ₹2 to utilise them for agricultural purposes and check encroachments. “We will discuss this plan at a convention of grassroots leaders to be attended by Home Minister Amit Shah on August 29,” he said.

“Witch-hunt by Chidambaram”

Referring to the acquittal of all seven accused in the Malegaon blast case by a special court on Thursday, the Chief Minister said the verdict exposed the conspiracy hatched by the Congress to defame the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Hindu society.

Accusing former Home Minister P. Chidambaram of targeting RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, he said the court’s verdict reaffirmed the Congress’s conspiracy that the people knew about at that time.

“The people should now grill Mr. Chidambaram for trying to link Hindu society with terror,” he said.