2 min readGuwahatiUpdated: Jul 30, 2026 05:11 AM IST
Two years after it passed legislative amendments that put tight restrictions on the sale and purchase of land around certain institutions, the Assam Assembly passed a revised Bill Wednesday that redefines the phrase “original inhabitants”. The 2024 law was passed but did not come into force.
The government Wednesday introduced a revised set of amendments to the Assam Land Revenue and Regulation Act. In 2024, the previous Assam Legislative Assembly had passed the Assam Land and Revenue Regulation (Amendment) Bill, 2024, restricting the sale and purchase of land within a 5-kilometre radius of “iconic heritage structures” over 250 years old to “original inhabitants”, which it defined as people who have been living, along with their families, in that area “for three generations prior to the date of commencement of the Act”.
The revised Bill passed by the Assembly Wednesday has tweaked the definition of an original inhabitant as a person “who has been living in that area along with his family for [the] last three generations up to January 1, 2006” and defines a generation as “a period of 25 years of continuous living.”
The Assam government has, on multiple occasions, said that the institutions targeted by these restrictions are Barpeta Sattra, Batadrava Than and the sattras of Majuli, all of which are important centres of Assam’s neo-Vaishnavite traditions.
The amended Bill also proposes that the District Commissioner of the district may evict “unauthorised occupants” from the “protected heritage area” so defined. However, it has made a broad set of exemptions for Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled Castes, “indigenous ethnic communities”, which it has defined as Moran, Motok, Chutia, Koch Rajbonshi and Ahom, and “disadvantaged groups”, defined as people from the tea and Adivasi communities, as well as those notified by the government “from time to time.”
In the discussion on these amendments, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma claimed that they were “secular”.
“If there’s any religious institution more than 250 years old, within 5 km around there, only the indigenous people there will stay… Even I can’t go and stay there. It is not discriminating against religious minority. It is for everybody… And the original inhabitants will stay there, whether they are Hindu or Muslim,” he said.