Encroachment at Assam’s borders: A threat to forests, biodiversity, and state sovereignty

Encroachment on forest land has remained a perennial problem for Assam, and the sinister phenomenon comes with different shades. First, organised illegal occupation with political backing on forest land by the State's own people, especially in reserve forests, has been widespread to the extent that vast stretches of biodiversity-rich forests have been wiped out. Another ominous and long-drawn trend concerns unauthorised occupation of forests by people from our neighbouring States.

As per official data, a staggering 72,000 hectares of forest land inside Assam's reserve forests situated near inter-State borders have been encroached by people from neighbouring States like Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram. Assam's persisting border rows with neighbouring States, particularly Nagaland and Arunachal, have acquired complications over the years, with incidents of fresh intrusion and disturbance along these volatile areas by miscreants from across the inter-State boundary being not infrequent.

The modus operandi followed is to occupy and clear the forest tracts and set up human settlements. More often than not, the governments in the neighbouring States sought to ac-cord legitimacy to such illegal acts by setting up offices, schools, hospitals, places of worship, etc. While some such areas could be on 'disputed' border land, a majority of the encroachments have occurred inside Assam's territory.

The reasons behind this large-scale encroachment on border areas are quite obvious. There is hardly any presence of the Assam government in these areas, making things easier for the encroachers to occupy the unprotected land with impunity. Also apparent is the fact that successive Assam governments rarely took up the matter with their neighbouring counterparts in the right earnest.

The present State government has shown some alacrity in engaging with the neighbouring governments to resolve the contentious issues on a give-and-take basis. But, unfortunately, some critical forest habitats of Assam, sharing inter-State borders, continue to be ignored. Unless ad-dressed immediately, these issues stand to cause long-term harm to biodiversity conservation.

Particularly frustrating has been the government's lackadaisical attitude in properly drawing the boundaries of the newly-created protected areas like Dehing Patkai National Park and Behali Wildlife Sanctuary - both of which have their areas encroached by people from Arunachal Pradesh. With the boundary issues left unresolved, encroachment from the Arunachal side has kept eroding large areas of the nation-al park and the sanctuary.

The Assam government, for reasons best known to it, has never deemed it fit to take up these persisting issues with its Arunachal counterpart. The immediate need for Assam is to make its security presence felt across the border stretches, especially in the more vulnerable points. Some infrastructure augmentation too is another urgent need