Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, on Thursday (January 1, 2026), threatened to withdraw all incentives given to tea estate owners if they oppose the move to grant land rights to their workers.
The State government brought legislation in November 2025 to make tea garden workers the owners of the land they occupy in the ‘labour lines’ of the tea estates. Labour lines are rows of dwellings for plantation workers in specified sections of a tea estate.
The Assam Fixation of Ceiling on Land Holdings (Amendment) Act seeks to remove the labour lines from the “ancillary land” category in tea estates. The government claimed that this would guarantee “land protection” for 3.33 lakh tea worker families across 825 tea estates in the State.
“The tea workers have the right to land after 200 years of living in Assam,” the Chief Minister said.
“The response of the tea garden owners [to land distribution] is not very positive. We shall withdraw the incentives to the planters, who do not cooperate with the government in this regard,” he said.
