Call for new economic block to promote NE

Major Events Vol. 3 Issue No. 38

November 16-30, 2007

Call for new economic block to promote NE

Calling for out-of-box thinking, Minister of State for Commerce and Industry, Jairam Ramesh mooted the idea of forming a new sub-regional grouping of the North Eastern Region and its neighbouring countries. The Minister was delivering the valedictory address at the Sixth High-level Conference on Asian Economic Integration: Agenda for the East Asia Summit, here today. The Minister’s address at the international conference of think tanks being attended by delegates from ASEAN countries besides Japan and UNESCAP representatives, assumes significance and reflects a change in New Delhi’s thinking .

Addressing the meeting, Ramesh highlighted the need to look at new economic blocks along with the existing ones. The North Eastern Region could become part of an economic block

Meanwhile, Prof Atul Sarma, a member of the Steering Committee for NE Region set up by the Planning Commission for the Eleventh Five Year Plan emphasized that the first priority for developing NE India should be on building up a unified and integrated common market for the region, as, NE States are economically interdependent.

Prof Sarma maintained that for establishing a common market of the above nature, intra-regional linkages in terms of various types of infrastructure should be built. He viewed that harmonization of different policies should be put in place simultaneously to remove all hindrances in the movement of goods and capital. For the purpose, elimination of the existing sources of irritation, like the border disputes, is also important.

What’s more, there should be a permanent institutional mechanism for resolving the mutual disputes as well as for promoting mutual understanding of the peoples and their cultures as the region is the home to numerous ethnic groups, said Prof Sarma.

Prof Sarma is also a former consultant to the UNO’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). He was Economic Advisor to the Eighth and Tenth Finance Commissions and served the Arunachal University as its Vice Chancellor.

On the allocations made for the development of the region, he said that the Steering Committee for the NE states was told that Government of India had spent Rs 80,500 crore on the region during the Tenth Five Year Plan.

The question raised was – where had the money gone. Because, the gap between the per capita income of the region’s states and the all India average continues to widen. Moreover, as far as the index of infrastructure is concerned, Assam’s rank has slumped from the 15th to the 16th among the major states between 2005 and 2006.

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