GUWAHATI, Aug 1: Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Friday said that he has directed all district commissioners to conduct surveys to ascertain the level of encroachment of forest lands in their respective areas.
All districts will conduct the survey, and those living in forest areas will be evicted, except those who are eligible for forest rights, the chief minister said at a press conference here.
‘Tribal people can stay in forests provided they have been there before 2005. We are going to evict people who are not covered under the Forest Rights Act,” he said.
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Sarma said the level of encroachment is very high and beyond imagination.
“Even if one eviction is carried out each month, it will take 10 years to clear the land,’ the chief minister said.
Sarma had earlier said that all unauthorised occupation of forest land, VGR (Village Grazing Reserve), PGR (Professional Grazing Reserve), Satras, Namghars, and other public areas would be cleared in a phased manner.
He had said 1,19,548 bighas (160 sq km) of land had been cleared of encroachment since his government took over in May 2021, affecting about 50,000 people.
Of these, 84,743 bighas are forest land and 26,713 bighas are ‘khas’ or general government land, he said.
Another 63 lakh bighas, including 29 lakh bighas of forest land, are still under encroachment in the state, though some of it is occupied by tribals who will be provided with ownership as per rules, Sarma had said.
Sarma on Thursday had asserted that the state government has cleared nearly 3,305.78 acres of encroached land in the ongoing eviction drive at Uriamghat in Golaghat district, the largest area to be freed from encroachers in the state.
Most of the people displaced due to the eviction drive are Bengali-speaking Muslim communities who claim that their ancestors had moved and settled in the areas where drives were carried out after their land in the ‘Char’ or riverine areas was washed away due to erosion by the River Brahmaputra.
Meanwhile, the eviction drive continued for the fourth consecutive day on Friday in six villages of Golaghat district, and there was no report of any untoward incident so far, officials said.
The eviction drive, one of the largest so far to clear 1,500 hectares of forest, once completed, will displace around 1,500 families, mostly from the Muslim community.
The drive began on Tuesday to clear the encroachments from Rengma Reserve Forest in Uriamghat in Sarupathar sub-division along the Assam-Nagaland border. (PTI)
