Saving today's NE for a brighter tomorrow

Amar Yumnam *

We know for sure that there is so much heterogeneity in our region called the North East. We know as well this sub-national concept of region and her commonalities better than anybody else from outside the region.

Though this identity was exogenously provided, yet the commonalities in terms of aspirations and developmental bottlenecks have made the people of this region not uncomfortable with this sub-national grouping. In fact, it has been seen as a medium to pushing the individual agenda through the regional gusto.

Now: For quite many years, the government of India had tried with the militaristic articulation of developmental interventions in the region. These interventions have naturally failed to deliver and terribly at that.

It is in this juncture that the globalization process has started sweeping across the globe, and India has naturally to put her policy in place for this. While framing her policy, India by necessity has to make efforts for increasing integration with the economies of South East Asia and East Asia. This is why the government of India has been talking increasingly of a Look East Policy.

Unarticulated Policy: The Look East Policy is a much talked and least articulated policy of the government of India. While trying to go for such a policy, the reality has struck home that the North Eastern Region of this country has somehow to be taken along in the integration process. This is exactly where the trouble and the challenge lie.

After many years of indulging in militaristic articulation of development interventions, as mentioned above, the realization has dawned on the government of India that the approach has not only failed but has also been a hindrance towards understanding of the region. We now see every ministry of the government of India trying to understand the region.

In this process of understanding the region, there is an element of urgency as well as imposition so as to capitalize on the commitment of national political to take the region on a development trajectory. The urgency is understandable as we have already lost full six decades – the lost decades of development for the North Eastern region. The danger lies at the imposition aspect.

There now seems to be a strong endeavour by every ministry of the government of India to present analyses and perspectives on the developmental issues of the region.

In this process, what we academics in the region observe is the approach of every ministry to the region to come with solutions and then look for the problems to establish a backward linkage with the solutions they have in mind. Well, what a dangerous situation this is!!

The damages caused by this approach of applying solutions without understanding the contextual scenario would be a very difficult to tide over.

Responsibility and Challenges: Now the region has to reposition itself to put a halt to this rat race of providing solutions to the problems of the region by the ministries of the government of India.

The responsibility as well as the challenge for the region is to put in frame the commonalities and the heterogeneity of the region from a developmental perspective attuned to the ethos of her. In this process of providing an alternative and appropriate perspective of the region by the region and for the region, there is necessity of mobilising the collective wisdom of this part of the country.

This mobilisation requires two things from the governments of the region.

First, they have to realise that time has arrived when they cannot shirk their responsibility away from articulating a regional approach to India's agenda for greater economic integration with the economies of countries in the east of us.

Secondly, they have to come out of their cocoons wherein the people running the administration have been enjoying a pseudo kind of safety and assumed-godliness in their ability to think and work for the region. They must realise that the people of the region have by now fully become aware of their unthinking and disconnects. People are also aware of their inabilities.

This articulation of sub-regional agenda is not a simple matter but requires a coordinated effort to indentify the differentiated as well as varied developmental interventions demanded by the region.

The opportunity is now to fully articulate the North Eastern Agenda, for the portends are that the region is soon going to be lost from the region. The region cannot be developed by solutions conceived elsewhere, but only by one evolved from within.