The Tea Garden Grows Inside a Forest That Fights to Stay a Forest
The Amchong Tea Estate has made tea for sixty years inside Amchang Wildlife Sanctuary, one of Guwahati's most pressured protected forests, where a court-ordered eviction and an army's rewilding have been needed to hold the peace with its elephants.
Amchang Wildlife Sanctuary sits on the eastern edge of Guwahati, Assam's largest city. Inside it, growing tea since 1958, is the Amchong Tea Estate. In plain terms: a working tea garden of roughly 1,782 acres, producing more than a million kilograms of tea a year, operates inside a legally protected forest that Assam's own press has called one of the city's most stressed patches of green.
That is the ground a visitor now stands on. In 2026 the estate opened to the public as "Amchong Leaf," pitching tea "at the source" and a slower kind of travel, as previously reported. This is not that story. This is the record of what surrounds the garden.
A sanctuary stitched from three older forests
A wildlife sanctuary is land the state protects for its animals and plants, where hunting and clearing are barred by law. A reserve forest is an older, looser category of the same idea: state-owned woodland with restricted use.
Amchang was assembled from three reserve forests. The Assam Tribune records South Amchang Reserve Forest at 15.50 square kilometres, declared in 1953; Amchang Reserve Forest at 53.18 square kilometres, declared in 1972; and Khanapara Reserve Forest at 9.96 square kilometres, declared in 1991. They were merged into a single sanctuary on 19 June 2004, for a total of 78.64 square kilometres (about 30 square miles).
Other accounts give a smaller number, closer to 70 square kilometres, and an earlier founding date. The Assam Tribune's breakdown is the more detailed account, so this office uses it, but the disagreement stands on the record. Certify the range, not a false precision: this is a small forest, well under 30 square miles, pressed hard against a growing city.
A road that may not run anymore
The sanctuary was once a road. By the record, elephants moved through Amchang from the Sonapur and Marakdola forests in the east, south toward the Meghalaya Hills, and west toward the Rani Forest and the Deepor Beel wetland.
The sanctuary itself was not the government's idea. The Assam Tribune credits its 2004 creation to years of pressure from nature lovers and wildlife enthusiasts, organised through the group Early Birds, with the Forest Department eventually agreeing to unify the three older forests into one protected block.
What that record does not settle is whether the corridor those enthusiasts were fighting for still functions. The same encroachment described below, houses and clearing pressing in from every side, is exactly the kind of squeeze that closes a route like this one. This office states the corridor's history as recorded and the encroachment as recorded; whether the road between them still carries an elephant is the open question the rest of this piece bears on.
Houses demolished by the hundred
The pressure runs the other way too. People settled inside the sanctuary, and the state spent years clearing them out.
The legal trigger was a suo-moto public interest case the Gauhati High Court opened in 2013, after a letter from the environmental group Early Birds alleged the sanctuary was shrinking to encroachment. The stated reason for the eviction that followed was ecological, not punitive: protecting the sanctuary's habitat and its wildlife, the same reasoning that created the sanctuary in the first place.
The eviction itself ran November 27 to 28, 2017, the single largest of several rounds since 2016. The district administration deployed some 1,500 security personnel, 300 demolition labourers, eight elephants, and eight excavators; 408 structures came down on the first day alone. Police fired tear gas and used baton charges against residents who tried to block the demolitions; four people were injured, reporting says, including a photographer and a security officer hurt in stone-throwing. Accounts of the total families displaced across the campaign vary by outlet, from several hundred to roughly 1,200.
Keeping this small forest a forest has already cost hundreds of families their homes, on a court's own order, not a rumour of one.
The city's own shield
The encroachment did not end with one eviction. Settlement keeps spreading, trees keep falling, open land keeps being cleared, by the Assam Tribune's own account.
The record shows the change in kind, not just degree: grassland and wetland once part of this same fringe are now built over, including the ground the Narengi Army Cantonment now occupies.
The Assam Tribune's reporting states the stakes plainly. Continued destruction of Amchang risks Guwahati losing its "natural shield," with higher flood risk, worse air, and lost biodiversity named as the consequences. By that account the forest doing the growing here is civic infrastructure, not backdrop.
An army learned to share its ground
The clearest measure of the pressure is what it takes to hold the peace. Next to the sanctuary sits the Indian Army's Narengi Military Station: 3,300 acres, roughly 10,000 personnel. On any given day, 35 to 40 of Amchang's roughly 90 wild elephants are on the station's own grounds.
The Army did not fight this. It built for it. Per reporting from June 2023, the station dug ponds, planted fruit trees and grasses, and cleared movement corridors so the elephants could find food and water without conflict, then installed 30 CCTV cameras, 9 zoom and 22 long-range HD units with night vision, to watch them.
The officers were direct about the arrangement. Major General RK Jha put it plainly: "it is their home and we have intruded," and the animals want only "food and water." Brigadier Sanjeev Chopra described "peaceful co-existence between man and elephant." Colonel Monark called it a "mutual co-existence system" of sixty years' cohabitation.
Read that plainly. It takes a military station's deliberate rewilding effort, and constant surveillance, to keep people and elephants from colliding on this ground.
What the tea garden has always been inside of
The Amchong Tea Estate has grown tea here since 1958, run by the Khemka family across roughly 1,782 acres. Sixty-odd years of the same harvest, inside a forest that has needed a court-ordered eviction, an army's coexistence programme, and a newspaper's warning about the city's survival to hold its shape.
No specific report was found of an elephant raid or incident on the estate's own ground, and this office invents none. But the garden sits on sanctuary land where elephant activity is real, ongoing, and hemmed in on every side. This is one working example of how tea gardens across the state sit on the old road an elephant herd still walks; the fuller pattern is on record here.
What the visitor is walking into
The estate's director, Ananya Khemka, has compared the ambition of Amchong Leaf to Nashik's Sula Vineyards: tea experienced at the source, a slower way to travel. The tea is real, the estate is old and productive, and the invitation is genuine.
The setting is the same regardless. A visitor to Amchong Leaf stands inside a forest under 30 square miles, cleared of hundreds of families by court order within living memory, sharing its ground with elephants a neighbouring army base had to redesign its own land to accommodate, and named by the local press as the thing standing between Guwahati and its own floods.
The postcard is accurate. It is just a very small piece of the frame.