Written by: Kishor Kumar Kalita & Mahesh Deka
On the southwestern fringe of Guwahati, where the city’s expanding skyline gives way to marshes, reed beds and open water, lies Deepor Beel — a sprawling freshwater wetland that has long served as one of Assam’s most valuable ecological assets. Recognised as the state’s only Ramsar site and an Important Bird Area, the wetland is more than a biodiversity hotspot. It is a natural flood buffer for Guwahati, a seasonal refuge for migratory birds, a traditional fishing ground, and a crucial corridor linking elephant habitats in the Rani and Garbhanga reserve forests.
Today, Deepor Beel stands at the centre of one of Assam’s most contentious environmental debates.
The Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) is moving ahead with plans to construct a 4.7-kilometre elevated railway corridor through a section of the wetland — a project the government says is intended to reduce train collisions with wild elephants. Around 100 trees have been felled at Deepor Beel to clear space for the elevated railway corridor. Officials argue that lifting the track above ground level will let elephants move freely beneath the structure, addressing a conservation concern in an area that has witnessed repeated elephant deaths over the past two decades.
The proposal has drawn support from those who see it as a pragmatic fix to a pressing wildlife problem. But conservationists, researchers and local residents believe it raises a more fundamental question: can infrastructure meant to protect wildlife succeed if it is built inside one of the country’s most fragile wetland ecosystems? For them, the debate reflects decades of planning decisions, rapid urbanisation and mounting ecological pressure that have steadily turned Deepor Beel from a thriving landscape into an increasingly fragmented one.
A Wetland That Shaped Lives
Long before Guwahati expanded into a bustling metropolis, Deepor Beel sustained the livelihoods of thousands of people in villages such as Sadilapur, Dharapur, Majirgaon, Garigaon, Keotpara and Pamohi. It was a landscape of fishing, buffalo grazing and seasonal agriculture — farmers cultivated Bao paddy, garlic, onions and peas on land that emerged during the dry season, while buffalo herders kept large cattle sheds in the middle of the beel.
Jyotsna Ali, a resident of Garigaon who is also a poet and advocate, spent much of his childhood around Deepor Beel, watching a landscape teeming with birds, fish, turtles and elephants. He recalled winters when flocks of Openbill Storks descended on the wetland and the endangered Greater Adjutant Stork was a familiar sight, while elephants regularly crossed the beel moving between the Rani and Garbhanga forests.
“Deepor Beel belonged to all of us. We grazed cattle here, swam in its clean waters and caught fish. Women collected water lilies and foxnuts from the beel, and elephants regularly came to feed on them. Today, the water is polluted, the wetlands are shrinking and the beel is slowly dying before our eyes,” Ali said.
He traces much of that decline to unregulated construction: with no restriction on how close to the beel new buildings could come, land was sold indiscriminately and structures went up along its edges. Guwahati’s garbage, he said, is now dumped near the wetland, and water lilies and foxnuts — once abundant — have almost disappeared.
Subodh Das, 57, a resident of Hirapara, linked the damage directly to a dumping ground at Belortal. He said contamination from the site has made it impossible for farmers to grow crops in paddy fields next to the beel, or vegetables anywhere nearby, and that fish have vanished from the wetland’s eastern side. “Recently, local fishermen released fish seed in the beel, but on the eastern side no fish survive because of the pollution,” Das said.
Ali also believes the railway’s original alignment through the wetland was a historic mistake — one shaped, he argued, by the interests of large landholders.
“Because some people have large tracts of land to the north of the beel, the railway line was not constructed on the northern side, beside the Assam Engineering College. If it had been, the beel would have been saved and the elephants would not have died,” he said.
The line was laid in 1989 directly through the corridor where elephants descend to the wetland; residents had pushed for it to run beside the Engineering College instead, but the demand went unmet.
“Even today, if the railway line is shifted to an alternative route outside the wetland, Deepor Beel can still be saved. Otherwise, future generations will only witness its destruction,” he said.
Why the Elevated Corridor Was Proposed
The idea of an elevated railway corridor emerged in September 2021, when Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma asked Union Minister of State for Railways Darshana Jardosh to support the project. According to the Chief Minister’s Office, the corridor was proposed to give elephants an obstruction-free passage in response to repeated fatal train collisions in the Deepor Beel area.
The proposal forms part of a broader railway expansion between New Bongaigaon and Guwahati, particularly the Azara–Kamakhya section, where elephant movement frequently intersects with the tracks. Supporters argue that raising the line would let elephants pass underneath while allowing trains to run without interruption.
“While the ecological sensitivity of Deepor Beel is undeniable, we must confront the reality on the ground. Our wildlife is in immediate peril, and this corridor is a pragmatic, necessary lifeline to ensure their safe passage through an already fractured landscape,” said a local conservationist requesting anonymity.
Critics, however, question whether the plan addresses the root cause of the crisis rather than its symptoms.
“An elevated track might stop trains from hitting elephants, but it is merely a band-aid on a much deeper wound. By driving massive concrete infrastructure directly into one of our most fragile wetlands, we aren’t solving the ecological crisis—we are just cementing the decades of poor planning and unchecked urbanization that fractured Deepor Beel in the first place,” said an independent wetland researcher.
The stakes are borne out in the numbers. Official studies indicate nearly 15 elephants have died after being struck by trains in the Deepor Beel landscape over the past two decades. A recent report jointly prepared by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research found that Assam recorded the highest number of elephant deaths from train collisions in India between 2009 and 2024 — 82 elephants killed statewide in that period. Those figures have strengthened calls for safer railway infrastructure, even as many conservationists argue that simply elevating the existing line does not resolve the wetland’s larger ecological problems.
Alternative Routes Were Suggested Years Ago
The controversy is not new. Environmental opposition to routing railway infrastructure through Deepor Beel dates back to the late 1980s, when campaigners and academics warned it would fragment wildlife habitat and permanently damage one of Assam’s most important ecosystems.
That opposition has a documented history. On September 6, 1989, the Assamese newspaper Budhbar — edited by the late journalist Parag Das — carried an article by Achintya Nayan Bezbaruah, then a lecturer at Assam Engineering College, warning that routing a noisy external structure like a railway through or beside the newly declared Deepor Beel Sanctuary would jeopardise its chances of gaining the international recognition it deserved as a wetland of major ecological importance.
Two months later, in the November 8, 1989 issue, Parag Kumar Das went further, accusing the then Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) government under Prafulla Kumar Mahanta and the railway authorities of sidelining Deepor Beel’s conservation in favour of narrow political and business interests. He also flagged a telling discrepancy: at the time, different government departments could not even agree on how large the sanctuary was — the State Forest Department put it at 4.14 sq km, the Town Planning Department at roughly 10.14 sq km, satellite imagery suggested nearly 200 sq km, and the Forest Control Department cited 54.89 sq km. Das suggested this confusion was not accidental, alleging that understating the sanctuary’s size served the interests of an influential few, and he posed a question that still hangs over the wetland today: whether some sustained force had kept working, year after year, to shrink Deepor Beel’s land.
Those early warnings were later borne out in official findings. During proceedings before the National Green Tribunal (NGT), the Assam government told the tribunal that a Wildlife Institute of India (WII) feasibility study had examined an alternative alignment outside Deepor Beel altogether. According to the affidavit filed with the tribunal, the preferred option was a northern route that would avoid both the elephant corridor and the wetland itself.
That alternative has never been implemented. Environmentalists are now asking why authorities chose to build an elevated corridor along the existing alignment rather than adopt the route their own commissioned study recommended — echoing, almost identically, the alternative that journalists like Parag Das had already pressed for more than three decades earlier.
A Wetland Under Multiple Pressures
The railway is only one of several threats facing Deepor Beel. Over the past three decades, urbanisation, encroachment, industrial expansion and municipal waste dumping — including the site at Belortal that Das blames for ruined crops and dying fish — have altered the wetland’s hydrology and water quality. Where residents once swam and fished in clean water, large sections are now polluted, agricultural yields near the beel have fallen, and fish populations have declined.
Scientists note that the wetland’s value extends well beyond wildlife conservation: it stores floodwater, recharges groundwater and regulates the local climate, supporting hundreds of plant and animal species. Its continued degradation could raise flood risk across western Guwahati even as it erodes one of the region’s richest biodiversity sites. Conservationists argue future planning needs to treat Deepor Beel as an integrated ecological system, rather than address railway safety in isolation from everything else pressing on the wetland.
The Road Ahead
Nearly four decades after conservationists first warned against routing a railway through Deepor Beel, the central question they raised remains unanswered: can Assam improve railway safety without sacrificing its only internationally recognised wetland?
Environmentalists are calling for a transparent, science-based review of all available alternatives, including the northern alignment recommended in the WII’s own earlier study, alongside independent environmental assessments, wider public consultation and firmer enforcement of wetland protections.
For people who grew up on its banks, the stakes are simpler than policy language suggests. As Ali put it, the wetland “belonged to all of us” — and what remains to be seen is whether it will still belong to the generations who come after.