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Assam is the Brahmaputra Valley state that grows more than half of India's tea, sits atop Asia's oldest continuously operating oil refinery, and hosts the world's largest population of the greater one-horned rhinoceros — all while managing near-annual flooding, a decades-long citizenship debate, and the aftermath of an insurgency that only formally ended in 2023.

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Before 1963, Assam's borders held nearly all of India's Northeast. Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh were each carved from what was, at independence, a single undivided Assam.

— North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act, 1971; Government of India records

Snapshot

Assam is governed as a standard Indian state with a unicameral 126-seat Legislative Assembly; BJP's Himanta Biswa Sarma won a second consecutive term as Chief Minister in May 2026. It is the historic seat of the Ahom dynasty, which ruled the Brahmaputra Valley for roughly 600 years and twice repelled Mughal invasions; the birthplace of India's modern tea industry, discovered in 1823 and now the world's largest single tea-growing region; and, more recently, the site of Tata Electronics' new semiconductor assembly plant, a bet on diversifying an economy long dependent on tea and crude oil. It also carries some of India's most persistent structural challenges: near- annual Brahmaputra flooding, a shrinking Majuli river island, and an unresolved citizenship- registration debate dating to the 1985 Assam Accord.