Dehing Patkai conservation at crossroads as Assam fails to act on Arunachal encroachment
The Forest Department admits that an area of 145 hectares has been under illegal occupation from Arunachal Pradesh for quite some time now.

Dehing Patkai National Park( Photo: 'X')
Guwahati, July 7: The inaction of the Assam Government in addressing the nagging boundary disputes with Arunachal Pradesh has severely impacted conservation in Dehing Patkai National Park.
The national park shares an inter-state boundary in the eastern portion with natural demarcations, i.e., the Namsang and the Dirok rivers while in the southern portion, there is no natural demarcation from the Hukanjuri beat office to Nakphan of Arunachal Pradesh.
While the Forest Department admits that an area of 145 hectares has been under illegal occupation from Arunachal Pradesh for quite some time now, the Assam Government for reasons best known to it never chose to treat the matter seriously.
One may recall that at the time of the national park’s notification, the Arunachal Pradesh Government had asked the Assam Government to ascertain whether the notified park falls in some of the disputed inter-state border areas. The reluctance of the Assam Government to pursue the matter resulted in its omission from the list of the disputed borderland. Consequently, the matter did not figure in the ministerial-level bilateral meeting between the two states aimed at resolving the border row.
Forest Department sources told The Assam Tribune that unless the issue was resolved at the earliest, it would remain a festering wound and bleed the national park perennially.
“The encroachment on the Nakphan side is expanding with the Arunachal Pradesh Government seeking to legitimize its hold in the area by encouraging different construction activities. The Assam Government has been taking a very lenient view of all these. Unless settled, this would trigger a conservation crisis in the national park in the days ahead,” sources added.
Another Forest official with long experience serving in the area said that the Government should either reclaim the encroached forestland or redraw the boundary by excluding the area.
“The laxity of the Assam Government will cause further expansion of illegal settlements. This has been happening for years now. It might be a prudent idea to redraw the national park’s map by excluding the encroached area,” he said.
An examination of the gazette notification of Dehing Patkai National Park (no. FRW.5/2018/386 dated 15.06.2021) at GPS points No.170 to 178 makes it clear that the bordering area under these points is under encroachment from the Arunachal Pradesh side, with establishments of a tea garden, road, RCC bridge, beetle-vine cultivations and human settlements.
Sources told The Assam Tribune that the area was earlier under the second edition of Jeypore Reserve Forest with an approximate area of 145.5 hectares.
The gravity of the situation coupled with the Forest Department’s inertia should be clear from the fact that till 1996, only one hectare of forestland was under encroachment whereas the entire 145.5 hectares had now come under encroachment.
According to sources, local forest officials were aware of the matter but during the time of preliminary notification, the matter was ignored. “Unless resolved immediately, this is likely to fuel border conflicts with the neighbouring Arunachal Pradesh, hindering conservation and protection of the newly-declared Dehing Patkai National Park. Expansion of the encroached area is another distinct and disturbing possibility,” sources added.
The absence of accessibility to the encroached area from the Assam side as well as the lack of logistics and manpower has been a deterrent in according protection to the area.
“This calls for urgent construction of a motorable road along the Assam-Arunachal border from Hukanjuri to Nakphan, which can be effective in checking unrestrained illegal logging and hunting from Arunachal side along the border,” conservationist Mridupaban Phukon who has extensively studied and documented the Dehing Patkai landscape, said.
Conservation circles have also called for the administration of the national park under a separate Wildlife Division for effective management. At present the infrastructure at the disposal of the park management is insufficient, with perennial constraints of manpower shortage, absence of forest camps at strategic locations, and dearth of basic amenities blowing a hole in the security mechanism.
Rampant hunting and illegal logging remain another grave issue that has not been addressed in the Dehing Patkai belt, including inside the national park.
“The devastations are continuing and we urge the Forest Minister to intervene immediately and equip the Forest staff with the necessary logistics to augment patrolling,” Phukon said.