Journeying through the North-East

-Sanjoy Ghose

During the years 1994-95, Sanjoy travelled extensively in the North-East, to understand first hand, the issues of concern facing the people. This was important, he felt. He met with many people and organisations, mostly connected to the voluntary sector, as well as teachers, academicians, journalists and bureaucrats. Through his sharp powers of observation, combined with formal and informal interactions, and in some cases, like during the malaria epidemic, by actually getting down on a hands-on task, Sanjoy not only managed to get a feel of the pulse of people and get to the heart of the matter, but also came up with some practical ways to address the problems of the region.

Urban poverty

There were no organised full-time development groups working in the urban areas, but in Guwahati and Agratala, the situation of the urban poor is serious. Pradip told us the story of Hemadhana Das, a Scheduled Caste immigrant refugee who fled from the violence in 1971, to come to Agartala and work as a daily wage labourer, driving a rickshaw as long as his health permitted. Having sold the little land that he had managed to buy in order to pay for the wedding expenses of his three daughters, Hemadhana now lives with his wife and three sons in the D Colony of the Municipal Corporation in Agartala, a one-room tenement without access to any ‘public’ services, of health care, education or sewerage. His eldest son apprentices with a mason; his other two sons wait for the ten o’ clock garbage truck, and then make the rounds of the garbage dumps, collecting waste plastic bags (price paid to them: three rupees per kilogram of plastic bags collected), glass bottles (fifteen to twenty paise per bottle), and even coconut waste which is used as a sort of poor man’s firewood. He himself has aged prematurely — although under fifty, his wheezing breath suggests asthma, or tuberculosis — and cannot ride the rickshaw every day. (The rickshaw is also hired, for between ten and twelve rupees a day). His wife cannot work either, having to stay at home to tend for him, and they rely entirely on the three to four hundred rupees a month the kids make off the garbage. There are many stories like these in the ‘chars’ of Guwahati, urban ghettoes of immigrant workers from Bangladesh.

Education

Although many of the states in the north eastern region do have the highest percentages of literate population in the country, there was a refrain that the type of education had alienated the people not only from their traditional cultures, but also from the notion of hard work for a living.

This is a very serious issue for policy-planners. What do people and communities have to look forward to after education? It would be ironical if we were to come around to recommending the vocationalisation of higher education, because we have taken communities from a state of almost
complete self-reliance through to a different level of aspirations. Yet if we were to provide the kind of employment opportunities that the people are now skilled at, by opening up the area to the private sector, there could be two likely consequences. One is the further westernisation of culture, with the emphasis on individualism that the market demands. The other could be an untrammeled exploitation of the region’s natural resources, currently amongst the best resource bank in India, if not in the whole world.

Although the tribal states are casteless, the new equations of class are beginning to establish themselves. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Nagaland, where the lifestyles of the rich, with their opulent, well-guarded mansions, and their holidays abroad stand in sharp contrast to the really poor, who are at the edge of poverty — but the situation is not vastly differet in the other areas. Along with this class-differentiation, a feeling of being excluded from the mainstream is also strong. This tends to be more among those slightly educated rather than those without access to any formal schooling at all.

Where are the roots of this feeling of non-Indianess? Is it chauvinist to expect these peoples to be part of the so called ‘Indian’ mainstream? From our analysis, there are three main reasons: firstly, elements of history — the bona fides of the merger with the Indian union; secondly the whole context of party politics that has been foisted on them,
with the attendant leverage it gives the national government, to topple the regional party in power by corrupting its legislators; and thirdly the sense of being swamped by non-tribal populations, as the demographic shuffle plays itself out, the way it has in Tripura. Should there be a concern with bringing these areas into the mainstream? If so, what could be the approach?

Governance

The issue of governance is very complex in the North East, with some areas being subject to the Sixth Schedule and others in which the Panchayats (as applicable after the 73rd amendment) apply. The Sixth Schedule was a moving concept in spirit, a way of ensuring functional autonomy, and protecting indigenous culture. When the states were reorganised in 1971, there was a recognition at the political level of the need to transfer power in a real and autonomous sense, but ‘...as it is the provisions of the Sixth Schedule are not uniform in all areas brought within its ambit. The Councils in their intervention are liable to state intervention to a large extent in Mizoram and Tripura; the scope of state intervention is slightly less in Meghalaya and lesser in Assam. The 73rd Constitution Amendment Act 1992 has brought out more than anything else the extremely limited power of self-government conferred under the Sixth Schedule: complete disassociation of regulatory power and decision-making power will lay utterly bare the incongruity of the system. The whole issue of inter-articulation of the Sixth Schedule and 73rd Constitutional Amendment will have to be carefully examined and a substantially altered Sixth Schedule evolved’.

Very little powers and finances have in fact been transferred to the ADCs. Take the case of the funds transferred by the Central government under Article 275 to the State of Meghalaya. Because of this difficulty in accessing revenue from the government, ADCs are forced to take shortcuts to raise resources for perfectly genuine causes, within their mandate. Tactics resorted to are permitting extraction of timber beyond the ecologically sound management limit; large-scale leasing out of land to private individuals, etc. The Karbi Anglon DC could not create a judiciary because of problems with release of funds by the state government.

Environment

The context of the environment is very different in the North East. It is the life blood of the communities here, and perhpas one of the few places in the world where a symbiotic relationship between man and nature is actually nurtured through traditional tribal institutions, culture and practices. This is under threat, and is changing rapidly. Except in Arunachal, all the wildlife reserves and forests have been heavily encroached, mostly by illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. This has not only put pressure on forest resources and land, but has resulted in two man-made problems. Firstly, as the immigrants come in more or less unchecked, it has divided the local population along communal lines, and has been the cause of increasing tension that always existed between the outsiders and the locals. Secondly, since the reserve forest areas are outside the purview of the state government in terms of provision of services, they are doubly affected by poverty, and the lack of access.

The rate at which the jungles are being cut (where there are jungles left) is devastating. The satellite survey (State of India’s Environment, 1994) brought out the fact that though the land under forests had increased in the country as a whole, the only region where there was a net decrease was the North East. This is all the more serious given the very real dependence of the people in the area on natural resources. In fact, the whole notion of Joint Forest Management is stood on its head, since the land is owned by communities, and leased to government instead of vice versa. The record of community protection is also poor. The only areas that have managed to remain forested are ironically the areas under government control, rather than those owned by communities (in the form of district councils).

The purpose of the following section is to present a perspective for intervention in the context of the views and experiences of participants at the Charkha workshops in the North East. Obviously at a general level, the issues and nature of interventions would be quite similar, but each state, and in fact each tribe and ecologically different region has its own nuances. It would be unrealistic to expect a superficial study like this to give exact recommendations for micro-level action: at best, a mapping exercise could help to define the parameters, and form the basis for detailed study and research that would lead to the identification of project ideas.

Assam

The most important issue in Assam today (and has been for the last twenty-five years) is the influx of immigrants from Bangladesh. Fleeing a life of extreme poverty, they come across the border in large numbers, quickly filling in the interstices of society and getting assimilated. The magnitude of the problem is awesome. Aside of the absolute increase in numbers, the fact that most of the migrants are Muslims, with a strong and committed religious and cultural orientation, makes the possibilities fraught with a real tension of conflagrations.

At the same time, it is a fact that the poorest of the poor in the state are these immigrants, whether from Bangladesh or Nepal or Bihar.

In addition to the issue of immigration, one of the first things that strikes one about Assam is that as a state it imports most of its foodstuffs — fish, eggs, rice, etc. It seems
an oddity of pricing that fish can be transported from as far away as Andhra Pradesh and still be retailed cheaper than the local variety. The same is true of eggs, and onions.

At the same time, inspite of having natural resources and a climate that favours high value horticulture, the trucks that come from Kakinada and Verawal return not with pineapples and oranges, that can been seen roting on the roadswide in the harvest season, but with wood, and coal, making it a doubly exsploitative process — exchanging renewable resources for non-renewables. This situation is true for all over the North East, but since Assam is the largest state, and enjoys a relatively large plains area, the potential for intervention is much more.

Assam is a vast state, and cannot be treated as one homogenous entity. The obvious divisions are lower and upper Assam, and then again he hills and the plains. The latter divide is quite serious. In their memorandum to the chief minister of Assam in January 1984, the All Bodo Students Union argued that the Bodos had been ‘exploited and oppressed’ by he other ‘advanced communities’ in the state. Four years earlier, the Karbis hade pressed for the creatin of another state, and said in their memorandum: ‘In spite of more funds being made available to us, we could not make any further progress on the economic front, not to speak of social and cultural development. The main reason for our failure is the step-motherly treatment of the Assam administration. They have no goodwill towards other communities and ethnic groups.’ In a later memorandum to the prime minister (May, 1987), they said: ‘The people of theAssam plains have always felt and acted superior to he hillmen and the hillmen having been looked down upon are obliged to feel neglected, distant and inferior.... The God-given natural resources of the Karbi Anglon and the Noth Cachar Hills have been incessantly and indiscriminately exploited which have brought untold misery to the hillmen. Exploitation of bamboo, timber, coal, limestone etc., coupled with unplanned and anti-native tea industry have deprived many tribal families of their livelihood and have brought about a new dimension of influx disturbing the demographic balance in the hills.’

(Excerpted with permission from Sanjoy's Assam, edited by Sumita Ghosh and published by Penguin Books India)