Guwahati: After 200 years of their large contribution to building the greater Assamese society, the BJP-led Assam government has decided to confer land rights to the tea garden community. A bill has been passed in the winter session of the state assembly to start the procedure to allot land rights in the ‘labour lines’ of tea gardens to the plantation workers. The recently concluded winter session of the state assembly passed the Assam Fixation of Ceiling on Land Holdings (Amendment) Act, 2025, to solve the long-pending demand of the tea community. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma termed the act as a historic moment for the welfare of the community. CM Sarma said, “From generations of uncertainty to a future of ownership.
The Land Ceiling Amendment Bill 2025 will give over 3.30 lakh families of Assam’s tea community legal rights to their land. A giant leap for justice and a historic moment for Assam.”
Until now, the garden workers have been living in the labour lines occupied lands without legal occupancy or ownership. The amendment of the act will exclude labour lines from ancillary purposes and provide for preferential settlement with tea garden workers, securing their land rights. This will ensure long-term housing security to the tea garden workers and reduce the vulnerability to displacement, the amendment reads. The amended furthers says that the land will be heritable but not transferable for a period of 20 years. Discussing the amendment in the state assembly CM Sarma said, “ after 20 years the sale, lease, transfer, gift or alienation of the land will be permissible but only with the tea garden workers residing in the same garden.”
The amendment will enable the state government to identify the surplus land for development and redistributive use and also facilitate the integration of tea garden labour housing into mainstream government housing, social welfare and public health programs, the statement of objects and reasons for the amendment says. It should be mentioned that after the land ownership, over 3.3 lakhs of tea garden worker families will be entitled to welfare schemes like PM Awas Yojana to construct their own house on their own land.
The total numbers of large tea gardens are 815 in Assam and the total area under the labour colonies is around 2,18,553 bigha. The amendment further says that the monetary implications arising from the acquisition of land in the tea gardens will be met with the existing budgetary allocation.
CM Sarma further said, “with this amendment the lands in the tea garden labour lines will be government land. We have asked the district commissioners to conduct a survey of land under the occupation of the tea garden workers. After the survey the state government will give them land pattas under their occupation.”
Lakhs of tea garden workers are celebrating the landmark amendment by the BJP-led government. They welcomed the decision of the state government with joy and celebration, as this will ensure the future of the new generations of the tea community. CM Sarma further said that under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the double-engine government has brought many changes to the lives of the tea workers. Till 2014, tea gardens in Assam had schools up to primary levels only, but after the BJP came to power, we have constructed 100 model high schools in tea gardens, and another 100 such schools are in the pipeline. It should be mentioned that the tea communities migrated to Assam during the colonial era from states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal. In the last 200 years, they have been disseminated in the greater Assamese society. But after independence, the Congress governments that ruled the state for most of the time never transferred the due rights to the tea community. The 60 lakhs of the tea community have always been used as a vote bank by the Congress regimes. But since 2014, under the BJP government, things have changed, and one of the largest communities of the state is getting its due recognition and rights, including land rights, in its own land.
