What ails the north east?

Reproducing my part of a conversation with S and S. We were talking about why things are generally pessimistic about the north eastern states, and why no one seems to care. The recent blockade of the entire state of Manipur for months together, while the rest of the country was engrossed in the antics in bollywood and IPL was a case in point. I don't understand why there is little or no coverage about life in these states in our so-called 'national' media, apart from military casualties. While I want to know about soldiers serving there, I also want to know more about life in those parts. However, all is not lost. The Hindu seems to be reporting regularly from Manipur, and that's a start.

My two cents on what can be done to improve the state of affairs:

Give more control to the states over the money. For example, the north east got some 10k crore grant recently (can't recall the exact instance, but Manmohan announced it a while back). This is in addition to the what the planning commission gives, and would be interesting to know what happens to this money. My guess is, a good chunk of it is returned unspent. (Like you said,) Some number crunching would help here.

So while funds aren't the issue, spending it properly is. Another thing Delhi can do here is to loosen the apron strings a bit. I am not sure how much grassroots governance exists here. Experience from Kerala/TN shows that grassroots control spreads development better than a top down approach. But the issue here is that Delhi feels uncomfortable giving up some control to these far flung states, hence the lack of real progress. Give some more control to the states to build their own roads and infrastructure as they see fit, I am sure some progress will be made. Agencies like BRO can build maintain genuinely difficult, sensitive and high altitude stretches, and no more.

Elaborating on this point, there is one more thing that makes no sense: everything about the north east is viewed through the national security prism. As though these states would want to team up with Myanmar or China! No one wants that, I (read that) the terrible memories of '62 are still around. We need to feel more self confident in dealing with our far flung areas and trust them to run their own affairs to an extent, at least to what exists in the south and the west (am not talking about another article 370). Trust me, once the spectre of Delhi being the colonial master intent upon using the natural resources fades, things *will* drastically improve.

All is not lost, though. The north eastern states have decent social development indices. This link shows some decent statistics, and some effort is being put into starting up IITs and NITs here.

This is the problematic area: Look at the road lengths in the bottom of the column.

I think the following would help:

* Fixing lines of communication, and exploiting the educational levels to bring more jobs here will do the trick. The insurgencies we hear about periodically will die out by themselves, the armed forces can be re-deployed for genuine national security duties. I am sure they don't like counter insurgency duties against the people either.

* Let the states build their own hydel power projects, the centre should just fund them with one time grants (like the one mentioned above), instead of actually building them using central PSUs. Then the states can use this the way they want: my guess is, they will sell the inevitable surplus power on the national market, and the monies will go into the states directly. There is bound to be some trickle down effect and long term gains.

* Open up these areas further to tourists. People like us still need passes to go to some states, like Arunachal! Can you believe that? I am sure the states are definitely interested in promoting tourism - it is as beautiful as Kashmir, if not more so.

* My pet project, that will need time to take effect: introduce more learning material about these states in the national curriculum. Too many of us dismiss the people east of Assam as chinese, etc. We don't really know much about the culture, history etc. This ignorance translates into indifference on part of our babus in Delhi. This is not some wishful 'all Indians are my brothers' theory - this is a definite issue and will translate into gains in the long run. It will also increase our self confidence when dealing with China, which, alas, we don't have much of now.