Evicting encroachers from government lands in Assam

Assam has been in the media headlines for many days lately due to a series of massive eviction drives to reclaim thousands of government as well as forest-wetlands in various parts of the north-eastern state.

- NAVA THAKURIA

Assam has been in the media headlines for many days lately due to a series of massive eviction drives to reclaim thousands of government as well as forest-wetlands in various parts of the north-eastern state. No doubt, regular evictions of encroachment, post-eviction reflections, and alleged forgetfulness often narrate the story of government initiatives to recover lands from the encroachers.

So whenever a declared eviction drive surfaces against illegal settlers on government grazing fields, forest lands (including wetland) or other reserved areas, it invites some 'highly sensitive' journalist-intellectuals to describe the sorrow of those evicted families in the media with the additional inputs from opposition parties. It usually gets multiplied by another section of 'ultra-humanists' and slowly the issue goes beyond public views. People soon forget, and many encroachers swiftly return to the location to reoccupy the land, using the same logic that they had nowhere to go, as their 'ancestral' lands were washed away during perennial waves of flooding. Everybody (including the government agencies) forgets the cycles of encroachment-eviction-rehabilitation, pursuing no pragmatic follow-up actions.