India\'s North-East Developmental Issues in a Historical Perspective
Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction/Alokesh Barua. I. Pragyotishpur to the End of the Ahom Period, AD 1826: Past is Prologue: 2. The silk route from North-East India to China and the Bay of Bengal: some new lights/Harprasad Ray. 3. The Tai migration and its impact on the rice economy of medieval Assam/Amalendu Guha. 4. The rise and decline of the Ahom dynastic rule: a suggestive interpretation/Alokesh Barua. II. The Company Bahadur and John Bull, 1826-1947: Growth and Stagnation Under the Raj: 5. The rise of an enclave economy/Hiranya K. Nath. 6. A big push without a take-off: a case study of Assam 1871-1901/Amalendu Guha. 7. A nineteenth century Puzzle revisited: clash of land use regimes in colonial Assam/Sanjib Baruah. III. India after Independence: the North-East: The Hindu Rate of Growth: 8. Development and decolonization/Hiren Gohain. 9. Unwitting accomplices: states as agents of inequality/Dipankar Sengupta. 10. Development strategy and regional inequality in India/Manmohan Agarwal and Sudip Ranjan Basu. 11. Structural change, economic growth and regional disparity in the North-East, regional and national perspective/Alokesh Barua and Arindam Bandyopadhyay. IV. Resource Endowment and Development Policy in the North-East: Planning for Growth: 12. An analysis of resource endowment and economic management (a study of North-Eastern India)/B.C. Barah and A.K. Neog. 13. North-Eastern economy: new policy options/Gulshan Sachdeva. 14. Convergence in the consumption behaviour: a North-East perspective/Sandwip Kumar Das and Monica Das. V. Population and Migration: In a State of Permanent Flux: 15. The migration problem in Assam: an analysis/Jayanta Kumar Gogoi. 16. \'Why do they come?\' economic incentives for immigration to Assam/Santanu Roy. 17. Growth of tribal population in Assam/Jaishree Konwarh. VI. Trade and Industrialization in the North-East: The Way Ahead: 18. Trade policy in India, growth and regional development/Manmohan Agarwal and Lodewijk Berlage. 19. History, trade and development: an exploration of the north-east economy/Alokesh Barua. 20. Trading across China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and India: impact on North-East India/Homeswar Goswami and Jayanta Kumar Gogoi.
"This volume India\'s North-East: Developmental Issues in a Historical Perspective provides a comprehensive study of the economic and political history of the North-East region. The main objective of the exercise is to understand the major developmental constraints witnessed by this region over the years and suggest policy prescriptions for future growth strategies.
The analysis pertains to the entire North-Eastern region, although the focal point is Assam for obvious reasons. First, from the viewpoint of geography, except Manipur and Tripura, all the other states of the North-East Region were parts of undivided Assam for a fairly long time even after independence. Second, there exists a rich corpus of historical research material for Assam but the same is not available for the other states. True, the region varies in terms of culture, ethnicity, geography and history of individual states but nonetheless the basic problems of underdevelopment are the same for all of them. The book attempts to contribute towards an in-depth understanding of the multi-faceted social, political, historical and economic problems that have beset the region over the years.
Any analysis of economic development devoid of a historical perspective often ends up in a misadventure. Reputed economic historians and trained modern economists and political scientists thus attempt to put forward their views on developmental problems and their solutions. In doing so the volume adopts a framework in which the region is cast not in isolation, but as a part of the Indian mainstream." (jacket)
