An eviction drive in Assam’s Dhubri district has left more than 4,000 people without homes after officials demolished houses in Alamganj Part-IX village under the Gauripur revenue circle, clearing around 650 bighas of land described by the administration as government-owned.
Estimates of the families affected vary, ranging from around 550 to 750. District Commissioner Dibakar Nath said notices had earlier been issued to people occupying 800 bighas, but demolition on the remaining 150 bighas was postponed because related matters are before the courts, with the next hearing scheduled for November 13. According to the administration, around 80 per cent of residents had left before the demolition began, after being given 15 days to vacate if they failed to produce documents.
Two versions of the same land
The administration maintains that the residents occupied government land and that the eviction followed the prescribed legal process of notices, hearings and a vacate period. The cleared plot is likely to be transferred to the industrial department, which has been searching for a site for an industrial park for two years.
Residents dispute the claim of illegal occupation. Some say their families have lived there for decades; one 80-year-old resident says he moved to the village in 1962 after erosion along the Brahmaputra River. Several households, residents say, hold touzi receipts showing payment of land revenue for occupation of government land between 1972 and 2016; those claims have not been independently verified. Families are now reported to be sheltering with relatives, under tarpaulins by roadsides, or in low-lying riverine areas. A school building and a shrine were spared, according to officials.
More drives promised
Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has said the government will continue its eviction drive until every inch of land is reclaimed. The Dhubri operation is the latest in a series of large-scale evictions under the state government, following the clearance of more than 1,100 families from forest land across Nagaon, Hojai and Golaghat districts about two weeks earlier.
Data compiled from the state revenue department and district officials indicates that nearly 19,000 families, most of them Muslim, have been evicted from government land in Assam over the past decade. The figures underline how evictions have become one of the sharpest political fault lines in the state, pitting the government’s land-reclamation drive against residents who say they have lived on the land for generations.
Assam has also been pushing tribal land titles in a separate review in Dibrugarh, while the administration has cracked down on illegal brick kilns in Chhaygaon. The Dhubri drive shows the same enforcement machinery operating at a far larger scale, with far higher human cost.
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