A New Vision for Northeast

(The article was originally published in Indian Express on May 24, 2025 as a part of Dr Madhav’s column titled ‘Ram Rajya’. Views expressed are personal.)

The Development of North-Eastern Region (DoNER) Ministry is organizing a major investor summit – “Rising Northeast: The Investor Summit” – this weekend in Delhi. Prime minister Narendra Modi, DoNER Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia and chief ministers of all the eight states of the region are participating in the event aimed at showcasing the investment potential and promoting developmental activity across the region.

For decades after independence, the region was mired in insurgency related challenges. Several major insurgent groups like the Naga and Mizo separatists had a field day until the 1980s. By the time the Union Government resolved those challenges through negotiations came violent insurgent movements in Assam like ULFA and NDFB with demands ranging from regional autonomy to separate sovereign entity. Infiltration from Bangladesh remained a serious security challenge leading to movements against it by organisations like the AASU and AAGSP culminating in the famous Assam Accord in 1985. All these developments led to the Union Government looking at the region primarily as a security concern. As far as development was concerned, people in the region saw Delhi to be too far off.

In 1992, the government of Narasimha Rao promulgated Look East Policy as part of its endeavor to enhance relations with South and Southeast Asia. Vajpayee government saw in it an opportunity to turn the Northeast into a gateway for relations with the countries in the east. Looking at the region not from the security prism alone but also from a development prism, Vajpayee government established DoNER ministry for the first time in 2001. Yet, although some movement did take place, the region continued to remain largely unattended to. An interesting taunt by Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, during a speech at Chennai in July 2011, in which she said that “We encourage India not just to look East, but to engage East and act East”, had jolted Indian policy establishment into action. The Narendra Modi Government formally upgraded the policy to Act East Policy in 2014.

Modi government saw the Northeast not just as a gateway in its Act East Policy but a pivot. Underscoring the importance of the region in its initiatives to connect with the ASEAN and East Asia, Modi Government pushed the accelerator hard for development in the region. Starting with Assam in 2015, state after state in the region fell into the BJP kitty in next three years, making it easier for the central government to take its developmental push forward easily. A region that used to feel not only physical but emotional distance from Delhi due to the perennial neglect of the rulers started experiencing a new intimacy soon after the Modi government came. Not a single month passed without a union minister visiting the region. In the first ten years of the Modi government infrastructure sector got a major push. Ministry of Road Transport and Highways allocated 10% of its budget to the region, constructing 4,950 km of National Highways investing over $ 5 billion. The North East Special Infrastructure Development Scheme (NESIDS), with fully funded infrastructure projects was launched in 2018, which has a billion dollar budget for roads, water supply, and power infrastructure.

Rising Northeast is another testimony to Modi government’s committed push for the regional development. Northeast is a region with unique potential. It is the only region in the country to have 5484 Kms of international border with five neighbours – Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet (China). Proposed projects like the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project, and the revival of the Stilwell Road will enhance the opportunities for land based trade between India and Southeast Asia through Northeast. Upcoming Sittwe Port in Rakhine Province of Myanmar and the existing Chittagong Port in Bangladesh, in spite of the current political turmoil there, can act as the potential openings to the world’s busiest sea routes in the Indian Ocean.

As the region gets another major push for development, it is important that the states get their priorities right. These days there is a fashionable tendency to look at getting investments into high-tech areas like defence, IT and semiconductors as the only meaning of development. There is no doubt that such investments have enormous potential. However, each region has to assess its strengths carefully before yearning for investments. Strength of the Northeast region lies in renewable energy, tourism and human resources. Over 40% of India’s hydropower potential, estimated at 62,000 MW, exists in the Northeast of which only 6.9% is being currently harnessed. Similarly,  the region has an estimated solar power potential of 57,360 MW, though only 17 percent of the capacity is installed. Investments in solar, wind, and small-scale hydro projects offer a huge opportunity.

Tourism, especially eco-tourism, has boundless potential in the region. With huge religious and ethnic diversity, diverse and colourful festivals and fares, Northeast could have been a heaven for tourism. One-horned rhinos in the Kaziranga National Park, golf courses amidst tea gardens in Tezpur, world famous Kamakhya Temple in Guwahati, root bridges in Meghalaya, glaciers in Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, Gomti river course through Chobimura Hills of Tripura, which is rightly described as “Amazon of Tripura”, and the country’s second largest fresh water lake – Loktak Lake – in Manipur with its beautiful Phumdis and floating villages should have been developed into major international tourist destinations. Sadly, while the neighbouring Thailand gets 35 million foreign tourists annually, and the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia gets over 2 million foreigners every year, the Northeast, with much more potential, ends up having less than two lakh foreign visitors.

The Northeast has another major advantage in the form of a big young population with almost 80 percent literacy rate, well above the national average. A good number of them can speak English also fluently. Yet, a massive skilling gap exists offering opportunities in human resource development. Natural resources including forest wealth too is another important opportunity.

What the Northeast needs is a new vision based on its inherent potential for development. That is what the investor summit intends to offer.