Bidisha Barman -

“Frontiers are rarely empty spaces without people,” Sanjib Baruah writes in In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast. “They may be places full of promise to some, but to those whose life-space is invaded, incursion comes as a shock, a disruption and a trauma.”

Assam’s land has been governed for two centuries through this frontier logic. Under colonial rule, it was mapped and managed largely for what could be grown on it or extracted from it. In Planter Raj to Swaraj, the historian Amalendu Guha traces how tea, oil and coal came to define Assam in the eyes of those who governed it, long before its land was acknowledged as home to communities with their own histories, rights and ways of living. The language has since changed from revenue and extraction to development and investment, but the basic pattern remains the same. Land that is not recorded as private property is often treated as unused and available for development. A place where people live can then be turned into a project site and displacement can be presented as progress. Assam is still valued for what can be mined from its hills, taken from its rivers or built over for the next township. Each project pushes its people further towards the margins.

This monsoon session, the Assam Assembly took another step in that direction. As the state counted the losses from devastating floods, it passed three bills that together reshape how land can be identified, acquired and used for “development”. Taken together, they appear to widen the reach of big capital while narrowing the ability of local communities to challenge dispossession.

Three Bills That Followed the Floods

In the third week of July, extreme rainfall over the Naga Hills sent the Dikhow, Disang, Janji and Dhansiri rivers surging through Upper Assam. Sivasagar, Charaideo, Jorhat and Golaghat went under within hours. By mid-August, more than 100 people had reportedly died and over a million had been affected. Entire villages were buried under silt. A week later, the Assembly passed three bills that make it easier to acquire land for investors and industrial estates while reducing assessment and public scrutiny.

The first, the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Assam Amendment) Act, 2026, amends the central land-acquisition law of 2013. Assam had already narrowed that law in 2023 by inserting Section 10A. The provision exempted only national security and defence projects from Social Impact Assessment and food-security safeguards. The 2026 amendment replaces that narrow exemption with six broad categories. These include rural infrastructure, affordable housing, state-run industrial estates, industrial corridors and public-private projects around airports.

It also expands emergency-acquisition powers. The state government may now declare a disaster or calamity of its own and invoke those powers on that basis. This could allow land to be acquired without the time and scrutiny needed to assess social and environmental costs. It could also allow food-security safeguards to be set aside along with the assessment itself.

The second bill, the Guwahati Satellite City Development Authority Act, 2026, creates a body to plan and develop satellite townships around Guwahati. Although it begins in Kamrup Metropolitan district, the government can extend its jurisdiction to other districts through a simple notification without returning to the Assembly. The Authority is chaired by the Chief Minister and its Executive Committee is made up entirely of senior officials. It has no guaranteed representation for an elected panchayat, municipal body or tribal council.

The Authority can override other planning bodies and decide how land within its jurisdiction is acquired and used. Land acquired for it is automatically treated as serving a public purpose. Once notified, it vests in the state government even before compensation is settled. Acquisition may occur through notification, private negotiation, pooling or development rights instead of cash. Landholders in a notified area also need the Authority’s No Objection Certificate before they can sell or transfer their property.

The bill’s protections for tribal, forest and wetland land apply only where those categories are formally recorded. That leaves out much of Assam’s customary land, including grazing grounds, forest villages, shifting-cultivation areas, wetlands and fishing grounds. Official records have often failed to recognise these forms of land use. A large part of Assam’s non-tribal indigenous population already lacks reliable land protection. It is now left facing a new acquisition system with little legal ground to stand on.

The bill’s enforcement provisions deepen that imbalance. Unauthorised occupation can attract imprisonment of up to two years. Demolition can follow after as little as five days’ notice with no compensation for what is destroyed. Only the Authority, not an affected resident, may complain about a developer’s violation. The Act also overrides any conflicting law.

The bill also places all existing government land within a notified area into the Authority’s land bank. In Assam, government land is rarely land that belongs to no one. It supports social relations and local economies even when it is not recorded as private property. Reclassifying it for development does not make it vacant. It removes a shared resource that entire communities depend on. That cost does not appear on a developer’s balance sheet.

The third bill amends the Ease of Doing Business Act. It creates a Single Window Task Force to fast-track clearances, including environmental consent, for projects in notified industrial zones. Presented as administrative simplification, it risks turning speed into a substitute for scrutiny.

Taken together, these measures do more than simplify procedure. They reduce the chances for affected communities to be heard. They limit the assessment of ecological costs and make it easier to convert land already under pressure from deforestation, mining, erosion and unplanned construction.

The Land Records Fall Short

Assam’s land system is already deeply unequal. Large parts of the state have not undergone a comprehensive land survey in decades and from the earliest colonial surveys onward, settlement was designed mainly to collect revenue rather than to recognise longstanding community use, leaving tenant cultivators, forest dwellers and riverine communities out of the record despite their deep relationships with the land. According to Assam government estimates, rivers have eroded around 4.27 lakh hectares or 4270 square kilometres, of land since 1950, about 7.4 per cent of the state’s total area. Official records treat riverine land as fixed even though the river is constantly changing it. Families who resettle after losing land to erosion often start again without a paper trail and many eventually become landless with nothing left to record.

Land revenue also has a violent history in Assam. Heavy tax burdens and repeated assessments pushed many cultivators into arrears, informal tenancy or the abandonment of land arrangements that might have kept their names on the record.

The British opened Assam’s land to planta after 1826 and later settlement policies pushed hard against land already held by indigenous and tribal communities. Efforts to manage this, the Line System, then Tribal Belts and Blocks, largely failed to hold. Hill communities eventually got stronger constitutional autonomy under the Sixth Schedule; plains tribal groups never did. The Assam Accord’s 1985 promise of legal safeguards remains unfulfilled four decades on.

Compensation remains tied largely to formal ownership, so the faster acquisition framework will place the greatest burden on those whose claims were never recorded, including families displaced by river erosion. Mission Basundhara, the state’s flagship effort to fix this, has resolved land grievances for fewer than ten lakh families since 2021, a fraction of the population without title. Fresh surveys have reached only some of the hundreds of villages never surveyed at all. The first duty of land reform should be a complete, transparent and participatory settlement process that establishes who actually holds and uses the land, before new laws make that land easier to acquire.

Where Is the Land Going?

The scale of land being handed over to private capital, much of it to major conglomerates, spans the length of the state. In the energy sector, roughly 18000 bighas are proposed for a solar park at Lahorijan in Karbi Anglong. This follows the earlier withdrawal of a 1000 MW, $450 million ADB-backed project after strong local resistance. In Nagaon, 286 bighas have already gone to Azure Power after Karbi and Adivasi families were evicted from Mikir Bamuni village; the matter is still in court. In Dhubri, Adani thermal plant threatens to clear roughly 5000 bighas and displace thousands from the Muslim minority community. The West Karbi Anglong pumped storage projects, 900 MW and 1200 MW, together need over 568 hectares, more than 223 of it forest land, while a 1500 MW project at Lipgaon/Pankumar needs 484 hectares, 441.9 hectares of them forest. A proposed 55 MW hydropower project at Ukiam-Kulsi would flood roughly 2130 hectares of river ecosystem, threatening the already endangered Gangetic river dolphin and the fish stocks downstream communities rely on and has drawn strong opposition from Rabha, Garo and Khasi communities.

Industrial projects follow the same pattern. In Karbi Anglong, 4000 acres have gone to Reliance for a Compressed Biogas Project, under an agreement signed with the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council on 12 June 2025 and opposed by local organisations and APHLC. In Dima Hasao, 9000 bighas of traditional tribal land have been given to the Adani Group for a cement factory.

Townships and tourism projects add to the pressure. In Barduar, Palashbari, roughly 1500 acres threaten more than 2100 tribal families with eviction. The Jagiroad Integrated Satellite Township, with a proposed 2700 bighas threatening over 2000 families, is one of the rare cases where the government backed down after sustained public resistance. In Kaziranga, 45  Adivasi families face eviction from their ancestral land for the Hyatt-Juniper five-star hotel project; the matter is still in court. Smaller but still significant transfers include 75 bighas of the Phalangni seed farm in Golaghat for Patanjali’s oil palm plans, and 150 bighas at Dorabeel in Palashbari for a private logistics park, both facing strong local opposition.

The Limits of the Landscape

Geography leaves Assam little margin for land speculation. The state is hemmed in by hills and threaded through by the Brahmaputra and its many tributaries. Floods and erosion steadily remove arable land while displaced riverbank communities need somewhere to settle. In the Brahmaputra valley, large tea estates continue to hold more land than they cultivate despite ceiling rules intended to reclaim surplus land.

The state has very little ecological slack to give away. Land signed over to townships and industrial corridors may previously have absorbed water, grown food and held communities together. Assam needs more of that reserve for its own people, not less, which is inseparable from the question of who controls the land that remains and how securely they hold it.

The hills have been opened up for stone quarrying, the riverbeds for sand mining and in some places the hills again for coal. The damage is no longer theoretical. Districts that had never flooded before are now going under, as blasted and denuded hillsides send water and debris downstream faster than people below have time to prepare for, a warning this valley had for years and did astonishingly little to heed.

The devastation in Nepal this August, when a glacier and rock face collapsed near the Tibet border and sent a wall of ice, mud and debris down the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli valleys, showed how fragile hill, mountain and river systems can be. Upper Assam’s floods this year point to the same vulnerability, both regions shaped by unstable geology and increasingly unpredictable monsoons. Assam cannot simply follow the development model of places like Gurgaon or Noida as the current govt suggests, built on relatively stable ground that can absorb large-scale construction in ways Assam’s hills and floodplains cannot; the terrain imposes limits no investment summit can wish away and ecology and economy are not separate questions here but the same one.

The question is not whether Assam should modernise but how. Concrete townships and a handful of corporate houses cannot be the state’s only route to prosperity.

Investment does not automatically produce broad-based prosperity. Communities may lose productive land while profits, ownership and decision-making move outside the state. Power generation, mining and township projects often require large investments but create relatively few local jobs compared with the land and risks they consume.

The Tata semiconductor assembly plant at Jagiroad is a useful test of this logic. The project involves an investment of roughly Rs. 27000 crore. The state and central governments are together contributing more than Rs. 14000 crore in incentives. Officials have promised as many as 27000 direct and indirect jobs. The land has been leased to the company for 60 years. The state’s semiconductor policy also offers power tariff discounts of up to 50 per cent for a decade.

These concessions raise a basic question: what does Assam’s economy receive in return once the incentives, tariff discounts and land are weighed against the promised jobs? Even when the outcome is a township rather than a factory, housing is often priced for investors and buyers from outside the state. Families whose fields and homes were cleared may be unable to afford the buildings constructed in their place.

This is not development if people who surrender their land cannot secure stable livelihoods, affordable housing or a meaningful share in the value created from it. Assam needs an economic model that measures success by local employment, household incomes, community ownership, ecological security and the share of value retained in the state. It should not be measured only by the volume of land converted or capital announced.

Safeguards for the Land and Its People

Assam needs a land-protection statute that cannot be overridden by a Gazette notification. The law must secure people’s land rights, give communities genuine control over local resources and provide strong constitutional protection for land held across generations. Without such a foundation, Assam’s indigenous and marginalised communities will lack the security they need to build livelihoods and improve their circumstances.

The law should complete land surveys with community participation and update official land records. It should recognise long and continuous occupation. It should extend protections comparable to the Sixth Schedule to plains tribal communities. It should also place wetlands, floodplains and erosion-prone areas under legal protection as shared commons.

Legal recognition alone will not stop people from losing land through debt, forced sales or later government decisions. Secure tenure is the starting point for every other safeguard. Isolated victories in individual villages cannot substitute for systemic protection.

Land protection must be paired with an economic strategy less dependent on real estate and extraction. Assam’s fragile landscape cannot support endless mining, thermal plants, large townships and other projects that consume vast amounts of land. The state should invest instead in sectors that already use skills and resources it has. With better credit, technology, market access and public support, alongside the deep reforms Assam’s agricultural sector urgently needs, these industries can grow, become more profitable and retain more value within the state, while creating more local jobs and placing far less pressure on fragile ecosystems than mining or heavy industry.

These sectors cannot employ Assam’s entire working population and should not be treated as alternatives to modern industry, but they support families, sustain local markets and preserve knowledge that should not disappear in the pursuit of corporate investment. Rising input costs, machine-made competition and inadequate state support have weakened them, even as they ask far less of the land in return. This does not mean limiting Assam’s young people to traditional occupations- they deserve opportunities in engineering, technology, manufacturing and research, as well as fair access to jobs in the railways, refineries, health services, education and the power sector and the growing contractualisation of employment across these sectors must stop. Assam needs more public-sector and locally accountable industries that can absorb technically trained graduates, a responsibility that should not be left to private investors whose promised jobs may not reach the local population.

Before these bills were passed, the state had already begun implementing memoranda of understanding signed during Advantage Assam 2.0 in 2024. The summit involved investment commitments of Rs. 5 lakh crore. Land and resources were being committed to investors before the legal framework for acquiring that land had cleared the Assembly. Administrative goodwill alone cannot protect people’s rights.

Relentless efforts from the communities have forced the state to retreat from some projects, proving that resistance still matters. But a government that can be pushed back once can just as easily come back harder the next time, at the next village, better armed than it was before.

That is exactly what makes a stronger constitutional safeguard unavoidable now, not a courtesy to be granted at the state’s convenience, but the only guarantee that people will not have to keep winning the same fight, village after village, merely to hold on to land that was always theirs. It needs decision-making power returned to local and grassroots institutions rather than concentrated among officials in Dispur or Delhi. It also needs an economy that uses land to sustain communities rather than one that treats communities as obstacles to land conversion.