Mizoram, Assam to hold ministerial-level meeting on Aug 9 to resolve border dispute

August 3, 2024 9 Views No Comment

Aizawl, August 3 (IANS) A ministerial-level meeting of the Mizoram and Assam governments will be held in Aizawl on August 9 to find a lasting solution to the decades-old inter-state border dispute between the two northeastern states, officials said on Friday.

A senior official of the Mizoram Home Department said that Home Minister K. Sapdanga would lead the state’s delegation while the Assam delegation would be headed by the state’s Border Protection and Development Minister Atul Bora.

Due to the Assembly election in Mizoram in November last year and Lok Sabha elections in April-June, the pending meeting between the two states could not be held for a long time, the official said.

He said that as per the decision of the ministerial level meeting held in Guwahati in November 2022, the Mizoram government has already submitted a list of 62 border villages to the Assam government that are within the Mizoram territory.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and his Mizoram counterpart Lalduhoma during a meeting on February 9 in Guwahati agreed to make joint efforts to resolve the long-pending inter-state border issue. Assam and Mizoram share a 164.6 km-long border with Mizoram’s Aizawl, Kolasib, and Mamit districts abutting southern Assam’s Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi districts.

Amid the long-standing border dispute between the two states, the border area saw its worst-ever violence on July 26, 2021, when the Assam and Mizoram Police exchanged fire in the disputed area near Vairengte village on National Highway 306, leaving six Assam Police personnel dead and many injured.

Mizoram claims that 509 square miles of the reserved forest, notified in 1875 under the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation (BEFR) 1873, falls within its territory. Assam, on the other hand, regarded the border shown on a map prepared by the Survey of India in 1933 as its current boundary. The border dispute began in 1972 when Mizoram, then one of the districts of Assam became a Union Territory and the boundary between Assam and Mizoram was vaguely made under the North-East Areas Reorganisation Act, 1971, without any ground demarcation.