William Easterly and Jeffrey Sach are both celebrated development economists who have been giving advices to different countries of the world on right policies for growth.

Both have admitted on how their genre of Experts from outside has erred terribly around the world without appropriate understanding of the contextual realities of the countries or regions they were advising on.

Easterly’s Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics and Sach’s The End to Poverty: The Economic Possibilities of Our Time are both masterpieces in this regard and are widely read by any economist before ever venturing to render any kind of analysis and advice to the regions one does not belong to.

Indeed, any expert from Delhi or elsewhere in the country should read these two books first and appreciate the spiritual lessons contained in these two before they ever think of advising and recommending on the North East.

Well, this would constitute a matter for some of my forthcoming papers and the Special Lecture to be delivered in the Annual Conference of the North Eastern Economic Association in Agartala later in the month.

Incentives and People: Well today I would like to speak of a contextual understanding of two important themes running through Easterly’s book. One theme repeatedly emphasized is that people do respond to incentives. Indeed the global development history is fundamentally a history of how people had responded to the stimuli prevailing at different periods in their respective societies.

This is also the case in Manipur as well. It would be rewarding to have a detailed examination of the kind of incentives in play in the State in recent history, and this would go a long way in accounting for the growth experience during this period.

What I am attempting here is only a minor glimpse of the macro potentials. The transition from a kind of culture and governance prevailing in the country to one of Indian democracy was so abrupt and non-accordant.

This definitely caused absolute upheaval in the incentive structures prevailing here, and the resultant structure of incentives, being exogenous, served very little, if any, the cause of developmental transformation of the State.

This non-accordant change caused the emergence of a response structure in this land appropriate to the incentives newly generated but certainly at the cost of development of the land and her people.

Government and Growth: Another theme emphasized by Easterly is that bad governments can kill growth. We can think of how this has happened here in the context of the non-contextual incentives generated and the kind of governance we have experienced.

We can think of reversing the negative impact of non-accordant incentives and the responses of the people to that if we have a conscientious government. But this has not unfortunately happened in our land and to our people.

One conspicuous character of any organisation and activity associated with the government is the decline in quality at a very fast rate as time goes on. This has created a widespread distrust of the ability of anything of the government to deliver.

This, however, was associated with the personal aggrandizement of the people related to the organisation, though the general population as expected did not reap any benefit.

The ultimate outcome of this is the current prevalence of rent-seeking behaviour all around in the administration. This definitely has had another round of perilous impact of the incentives generated here.

We can now try coupling the widespread collapse in the quality of governance with the wrongful incentives produced by the administration’s, central as well as provincial, to developmental requirements of the State.

Well, the result is now before us in very clear and loud terms. The government which had all along been guided by an Imphal-centric, at best valley-centric, approach to the developmental interventions of the State naturally failed to establish any semblance of governance in the mountains of the State.

Now naturally this approach was not a sustainable one in any case, given the contextual realities of the land and her people. The un-sustainability of this is now proved by the failure of the government to establish governance even in the Imphal area, witness the conditions of Paona Bazar and Thangal Bazar, and of course, the betrayal relating to the construction of Nupi Keithel.

Well, as regards the delay in the reconstruction of the Nupi Keithel , it is an issue now widely noticed and discussed among the women activists of the country, including advisers to the Planning Commission and Members of Parliament. Hope their current e-mail correspondences and write ups in the newspapers have the impact they should rightly have.

In the end, we now need the generation of a new set of incentives alive to the realities of the State and an administration with right governance principles.