The Gauhati High Court declined to postpone an amended statute that the Indian Tea Association (ITA) was contesting, allowing the Assam government to move forward with its decision to extend land ownership rights to tea garden workers. Counsel for the state government and the ITA made arguments regarding the change that was voted at the Assam Assembly’s winter session on February 4. The ITA resisted the revision, according to Advocate General Devajit Saikia, since it would “change the structure of the tea gardens.”
Additionally, the group of planters said that the action might interfere with the production of tea and the operation of the estates. The legislation was not stayed by the supreme court. Saikia claims that the court allowed the government to proceed with the program because it found it to be within the state’s welfare framework. Ownership rights would be awarded to laborers living in tea estate labor lines in exchange for Rs 500 per bigha. According to Saikia, 707 of Assam’s approximately 850 tea farms have labor lines.
“Without any rights over their land, generations of laborers have lived along these lines. The laborers occupying the labor lines within the tea gardens will receive ownership of the property when the Assam government began the process of granting them land rights,” he stated. In order to distribute land in labor lines for dwelling ownership, the Assembly passed the Assam Fixation of Ceiling of Land Holdings (Amendment) Act, 2025, after the state government had previously endorsed the policy choice. By giving land rights to laborers who have been “toiling in tea gardens for the last 200 years” after being transported to Assam during the colonial era, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma characterized the amendment as an effort to rectify a “historic mistake.”
