Himachal Pradesh has never had the luxury of pretending that land is just land. In the mountains, land listens. You cut too much, build too fast, ignore slope and soil, and it answers back. Sometimes through a landslide, sometimes through a drying spring, sometimes through a village emptied of its young. Section 118 of the Himachal Pradesh Tenancy and Land Reforms Act was born from this hard-earned wisdom. It was not ideological. It was ecological. It was practical. Above all, it was protective.The Himachal Pradesh Tenancy and Land Reforms (Amendment) Bill, 2025 claims to respect this legacy. The government insists that section 118 remains intact. Technically, that is true. Substantively, it is misleading. Laws are not destroyed only by repeal. They are dismantled more effectively by exemptions, so many, and so generous, that the rule collapses under their weight.That is precisely what this amendment does.In remote parts of South Asia, land is rarely just property. It is memory, insurance, identity and survival at once. In Himalayan villages, in the dry uplands of Nepal, in the forested belts of central India or in the hill tracts of Sri Lanka, land is often the only asset that families can rely on when markets fail or migration becomes uncertain. A terrace field, a small orchard, a grazing patch or even a shared forest boundary can mean the difference between staying and leaving.In many such regions, formal employment is limited and state services arrive slowly, if at all. Land fills these gaps. It provides food, fodder, fuel and sometimes cash income. It also anchors social relationships, inheritance patterns, village boundaries and systems of cooperation around water and forests.When people speak about losing land in these places, they are not only talking about economics; they are talking about losing a way of organising life itself.Across South Asia’s mountains and remote rural regions, smallholder farming still supports millions. According to the FAO and regional agricultural surveys, small farms account for the majority of agricultural holdings in South Asia, often below two hectares in size. These holdings may look marginal on paper, but socially they are central. They keep communities rooted in landscapes that are otherwise difficult to inhabit.This is why land policy in remote regions is never merely administrative. It is existential.The most comforting assurances in the Bill rely on paperwork. Cooperative societies made up “entirely of agriculturist members” are allowed to acquire land without prior permission, provided their bye-laws exclude non-agriculturists and an annual declaration confirms compliance. On paper, this sounds neat. On the ground, it is naive.Anyone familiar with how cooperatives function in Himachal knows how thin this safeguard is. These societies are lightly regulated, often politically influenced and rarely audited with seriousness. An annual declaration is not scrutiny; it is ritual. All that is required is a few local names on a register while effective control lies elsewhere. Section 118 existed precisely to prevent this kind of proxy ownership. The amendment does not close loopholes, it legalises them.Then comes the most consequential change, carefully dressed up as convenience.Non-agriculturists can now purchase built-up flats or buildings up to a prescribed size from RERA-registered projects without prior permission. But the real shift lies in what follows. The exemption does not end with the first buyer. It travels with the property. Every successive non-agriculturist purchaser can buy it freely.Himachal does not even need to look far to see where this path leads. Uttarakhand walked it first. Between 2016 and 2018, the state progressively relaxed its land laws, allowing non-locals to buy land more easily in hill districts, particularly for housing and tourism. The promise was familiar: investment, jobs, growth. What followed was equally familiar. Land prices rose sharply, local residents were priced out, speculative buying intensified and entire villages began to feel alien in their own geography. Protests under the banner of the Bhu Kanoon movement grew louder, arguing that land was slipping away not through force but through law.By 2024-25, the Uttarakhand government was forced to acknowledge this backlash. Facing sustained public pressure, it moved towards re-imposing stricter land controls, especially in the hills, conceding that earlier liberalisation had undermined social stability and local livelihoods. The reversal was not ideological; it was corrective.That is what makes Himachal’s moment perplexing. When a neighbouring Himalayan state has already tested this experiment, and found it wanting, why repeat it?Why treat land liberalisation as progress when lived experience shows it produces dispossession, not development? In the mountains, policy mistakes do not stay abstract. They settle into slopes, prices and silences.Across South Asia, moments of ecological crisis often reveal the consequences of treating land as an unlimited resource. The Kedarnath disaster in Uttarakhand in 2013 exposed how unregulated construction along riverbanks and fragile slopes magnified the destruction caused by extreme rainfall. More recently, subsidence in Joshimath showed how infrastructure expansion without ecological assessment can destabilise entire settlements.Similar patterns appear elsewhere. In Nepal’s hill districts, rapid road expansion without slope protection has increased landslide frequency. In parts of northeast India, shifting land ownership patterns linked to tourism and urban expansion have intensified pressure on forests and water sources. These examples differ in detail, but they share a common lesson: ecological limits cannot be negotiated through policy shortcuts.Disasters in mountain regions rarely have a single cause. Climate change, extreme weather and development pressures interact. But land policy often determines how severe the consequences become. When land is treated only as an economic asset, its ecological role disappears from decision-making. The result is not just environmental damage but social disruption, migration, loss of livelihoods and weakened local governance.These are not distant warnings for Himachal Pradesh. They are reminders from across the Himalayan arc of what happens when restraint is replaced by speed.The amendment creates something Himachal has never had before: a permanent secondary market for outsiders.Once land crosses this threshold, it never returns to the protective framework of section 118. Developers with influence can acquire land, build RERA-compliant projects and sell units time and again. Small size limits sound reassuring until one remembers how markets work. Units can be accumulated, flipped, quietly consolidated. What begins as a “flat” becomes, over time, control over a neighbourhood. This is not development. It is a pipeline.Equally troubling is the new freedom to lease buildings in rural areas for commercial purposes for up to ten years, extendable to 20, without any section 118 permission. There is no requirement for panchayat consent. No mandatory assessment of water availability, waste management, road access or cultural impact. Outsiders can now run businesses deep inside villages while ownership technically remains local.But ownership without control is an illusion. Over time, villagers do not become partners. They become caretakers, workers, lessors, participants in someone else’s business model. The land remains in their name, but decisions migrate elsewhere. This is how takeover happens without sale deeds. The locals themselves get alienated from their homeland.The amendment also softens what was once a firm line on misuse. Earlier, if land was not used for its approved purpose, it reverted to the state. Now, failure is rewarded with extensions, granted on payment of a penalty that can stretch across years. Call it what it is: a holding fee.In a speculative market, 5% of market value is not a deterrent; it is a cost of doing business. Especially when land prices soar the moment permissions are secured. Developers can sit on prime land, wait for appreciation, pay the state its share and later demonstrate token “use” to justify resale. The state has shifted from asking why land is being held to asking whether the cheque has cleared.All of this is unfolding in a Himalayan state that has just lived through collapsing roads, sinking towns and rivers that rewrote maps.Himachal’s geology is young and unstable. Large-scale construction here is never neutral. Hill cutting, dense settlements and multi-storey projects amplify landslides and floods. Places like Shimla and Kasauli are not suffering because regulation was too strict. They are suffering because it was ignored.In fragile ecological regions, land performs another role that is often invisible in policy debates: it stabilises the environment itself. Terraced cultivation in the Himalayas, for instance, is not just agriculture; it is soil conservation. Pastoral movement in mountain regions regulates vegetation and reduces fire risk. Orchard-based farming supports local water cycles. These are not romantic ideas but ecological functions recognised in mountain development research across South Asia.When land use shifts rapidly – from cultivation to construction, from community-managed spaces to speculative property – these stabilising systems weaken. Hill cutting for roads and buildings changes drainage patterns. Dense construction increases pressure on water sources. Waste systems designed for small populations struggle with tourism-driven growth. These processes do not appear dramatic at first, but they accumulate.The Himalayan region has repeatedly shown how small disruptions can cascade into disasters. Reports from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development and regional disaster studies have documented how unregulated construction and land-use change increase landslide vulnerability across mountain states in India and Nepal.This is why land cannot be treated as interchangeable across geographies. A plot in the plains and a plot on a mountain slope do not behave the same way. When policy ignores this difference, development becomes risk rather than resilience.The amendment does not correct this failure. It accelerates it.Barely around 11% of Himachal’s land is under cultivation. Within this narrow strip, nearly nine out of ten farmers are small or marginal. Against them stands capital that can outbid locals, outwait them and outmanoeuvre them legally.The government insists agricultural land is not being sold. That misses the point. Dispossession does not always arrive through sale. Often it arrives because holding becomes impossible, because prices rise, neighbours change and the economics no longer add up.When critics speak of Pahaadi sanskriti, they are often dismissed as sentimental.That dismissal is convenient. Culture in Himachal is not abstract. It is spatial. It depends on who owns land, who runs businesses, who decides how villages grow. Allowing outsiders to establish enterprises in rural areas without consent does not just change skylines. It changes language, labour and power. Over time, villages stop belonging to those who live in them.There is also a deeper political silence surrounding this amendment. Himachal’s dual-party system, long dominated by the Congress and the BJP, has produced alternation, not imagination. Elite politics, inherited legacies and factional manoeuvres consume attention while structural questions about land and ecology are quietly settled elsewhere. During devastating floods and landslides, the absence of serious political engagement on these issues was telling. Disaster management became optics; land policy slipped through clauses.This is where Yashwant Singh Parmar’s vision matters, not as nostalgia, but as contrast. The founder and first chief minister of Himachal Pradesh did not imagine the state as a peripheral extension of a homogenised nation-state. He understood that in a fragile mountain ecology, development could not be imposed; it had to be woven into land and community.Section 118 was not merely legal text. It was a political assertion that land in the hills is not a commodity but a source of dignity, livelihood and autonomy.The logic of the amendment is transparent: immediate revenue. Stamp duty. Registration fees. Extension penalties. What does not appear on spreadsheets is what arrives later, ecological collapse, social displacement, cultural erosion. Those costs surface through disasters, protests and migration. Uttarakhand has already shown where this road leads: hotels without water, towns without locals, growth without roots.Himachal is not being sold in one dramatic moment. It is being sold clause by clause, exemption by exemption, explanation by explanation. Section 118 was never perfect. But it understood something this amendment refuses to accept: in the mountains, restraint is not anti-development. It is survival. Once that understanding is gone, no declaration, no penalty and no revenue target can bring it back.Nirmanyu Chouhan is a researcher of politics and society. Divyansh Thakur, a Himachali student leader, is a former presidential candidate of the Panjab University campus student council and a junior research fellow in anthropology at Panjab University.