Indian Agarwood: Assam and Northeast India

India's agarwood industry is concentrated almost entirely in Assam and the wider northeast, where Aquilaria malaccensis, known locally as sasi, sanchi, or agaru, has been cultivated in home gardens for generations. This is also the species and the country behind agarwood's very first international trade regulation: India's 1994 proposal to list Aquilaria malaccensis under CITES Appendix II, covered in full in our guide to agarwood and CITES, and the cultural and devotional side of Assam's agarwood tradition is covered in our guide to agarwood in Hindu tradition. This guide focuses on the species, the geography, and a recent scientific discovery that has added a second native Indian agarwood species to the record.

Sasi, Sanchi, Agaru: What Assam Calls Agarwood

Aquilaria malaccensis is known in Assamese by several local names, most commonly sasi, sanchi, and agaru, the last of which is the direct linguistic relative of the Sanskrit aguru covered in our Hindu tradition guide. These names are used interchangeably across Assam's trade, research, and agricultural literature to refer to the same species.

Two Native Species: A. malaccensis and A. khasiana

For most of agarwood's documented history in India, Aquilaria malaccensis has been treated as the country's only native agarwood-producing species. That changed with Aquilaria khasiana, a Critically Endangered species previously believed to be endemic to Meghalaya's East Khasi Hills, where surveys found the population collapse to just nine trees in 2016 and roughly five by 2023, the sole surviving mature individual reportedly persisting through coppice regrowth rather than as an intact original tree.

Researchers from the Botanical Survey of India subsequently confirmed Aquilaria khasiana growing in Assam's Jeypore Reserve Forest, identifying it through a combination of morphological assessment, DNA barcoding, and a first complete chloroplast genome sequencing for the species, published in Scientific Reports. The Jeypore population was found to include more than 210 mature trees, a considerably more robust population than Meghalaya's, though the species as a whole remains classified as Critically Endangered given the continued pressure from international trade and wild exploitation.

The Species That Started CITES Regulation of Agarwood

Assam's Aquilaria malaccensis holds a specific historical distinction: it was the species behind India's 1994 proposal to bring agarwood under international trade regulation, which took effect on 16 February 1995 as the first CITES Appendix II listing for any agarwood-producing species, nearly a decade before the rest of the Aquilaria genus and the whole of Gyrinops were added in 2004. The full detail of how that system works today is covered in our CITES guide linked above.

Hojai, Golaghat, and Assam's Agarwood Geography

Assam's modern agarwood industry is centred on Hojai town and its surrounding foothill areas, which host large commercial plantations and are widely described in trade reporting as the processing hub for chips, powder, and distilled oil, covered in our Hindu tradition guide. Golaghat district is documented as a major centre for home garden cultivation specifically, with hundreds of households growing Aquilaria malaccensis as a cash crop. Historical distribution records also document the species occurring as homestead or plantation cultivation across Sibsagar, Sadiya, Nagaon, Darrang, Goalpara, and Cachar districts, reflecting just how widely the tree has been integrated into Assam's rural landscape over time.

Homestead Agroforestry: How Most Assam Agarwood Is Grown

Unlike large single-species plantation operations seen in some other producing countries covered in this hub, a significant share of Assam's Aquilaria malaccensis is grown within homestead agroforestry systems, where the tree is planted alongside other crops in and around family compounds rather than in dedicated monoculture plots. Researchers studying these systems have highlighted the species' favourable coppicing and pollarding capacity, meaning a harvested tree can regenerate from its cut stem or branches, as one of the reasons it has remained a viable long-term cash crop for smallholder households across the region.

From Vulnerable to Critically Endangered

The IUCN Red List's formal assessment of Aquilaria malaccensis has changed substantially over time. An initial assessment in 2002 classified the species as Vulnerable. A 2018 reassessment upgraded this to Critically Endangered, citing a population decline of more than 80 percent over three generations, and specifically described the species as extinct in the wild in India, even as cultivated populations in Assam's home gardens and plantations have continued to supply the trade. That shift in formal status over roughly sixteen years reflects how much additional pressure the wild population came under during that period, and underlines why India's domestic export restrictions, introduced in 1991, and the CITES permit system together now govern essentially all legal Assam agarwood reaching international markets.

Assam's Agarwood Industry Today

Assam remains one of the most significant agarwood-producing regions in South Asia, built almost entirely on cultivated rather than wild material given the species' extinct-in-the-wild status within India. For buyers, this means Assam-origin claims should be understood in the context of a cultivated, homestead-driven industry rather than wild forest harvest, with documentation and seller transparency mattering more than the regional name itself, a principle covered in our guides to quality and authenticity and the buying guide.