Standing in her village, with lush tea gardens stretching to the hills on the horizon, 19-year-old Sharmila Gwala explained why she was angry and upset: her only source of income—planting tea bushes and picking leaves off them for Rs 183 a day—was about to end.


On 12 May 2022, as security forces massed to prevent protests from Gwala and about 2,000 dismayed, anxious workers of the Doloo tea estate watched—some pleading with officials to stop—as a line of bulldozers began flattening parts of the plantation to build a new international airport, about 20 km from the city of Silchar in southern Assam.


“We do not accept the airport on the tea estate,” said Gwala, a petite young woman with a clear and loud voice, evidently not afraid to speak her mind. “We are not against the airport, but we will not support it because it is being built on land in which we have put in our sweat and life.”


More than a century after being brought in by the British as indentured labour, the mostly illiterate workers, largely tribals from Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, still live in primitive conditions with no water supply or sewage. The new airport threatens their livelihood, their dismay more acute because most are voters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won state elections in May 2021.


Nine months after elections in February 2022, chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma of the BJP announced that part of the Doloo tea estate would be used to build a new airport, supposedly part of the union government’s plan for 21 greenfield airports nationwide.


But the union government appeared to have no knowledge of the plan’s for the airport. In a 31 May reply to a right-to-information query, the union ministry of civil aviation said it had received no proposal for the Silchar airport, the Hindu reported, a fact confirmed on 8 June by India’s minister of civil aviation, Jyotiraditya Scindia, in a widely quoted letter to a member of Parliament.

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