North Eastern hill regions of India:problems and prospects of development: papers presented at the national seminar on rural development at the North eastern Hill university,April

The different geographical and ethnic entities that constitute. the north eastern region of the country have been in search of their separate identities over the last few years. This search has found expression in diverse forms in different areas-insurgency in Mizoram and earlier in Nagaland, a mass movement of an un precedented nature in Assam, sporadic bursts of violence in Tripura, Manipur and Meghalaya-but all of them could ultimately be traced to the economic conditions prevailing in the region. The collection of papers in this volume deal with a few of these conditions peculiar to the hill areas of the region The focus of the papers are on major problems among these conditions and on feasible solutions to overcome them.

Until recently the vast majority of the people of the hill areas of this region have practised a subsistence system of agriculture. They have grown all that they required. And so they have remained collective owners of their land and kept themselves away from the fluctuations of the modern market economy. But their standards of living have remained correspondingly low. If these are to be raised, as they certainly must, then their self-subsistence economies need to be replaced by those of a wider kind. This has already happened in many areas and the pace of transformation has been accelerated in recent years. New types of crops and new methods of agriculture are rapidly changing the economic structure; individual ownership and contract is replacing commu nity ownership and custom in land holding, and the consequent commercialisation of land is on the increase; agricultural debt is appearing and peasants are becoming labourers on land which were once their own.. With the change in agricultural methods, parts of the areas held in common by larger units, such as the tribe or clan, are being recognized as having passed into the usufructuary occupation of smaller units, such as the family, either in its narrower or more extended sense. A more clearly defined change is occuring when the cultivation of marketable crops takes the place of purely subsistence production. Boundaries become more clearly recognized; land tend to be held by a small family or even an individual and the conception of ownership replaces that of usufruct. This is true even of areas where cultiva tion is, owing to the character of climate and terrain and of tradition and custom, still of the 'shifting' type; but the movement is much more pronounced where farming is of a 'settled' and intensive character.

It is in the direction of encouraging 'settled', wet rice cultiva tion, in the place of 'shifting' cultivation (or jhumming) that the efforts of the state governments are set. The success or lack of it achieved in these efforts so far is the subject of analysis by Rynjah, Ganguly and Patton. The reasons for the lack of any remarkable success in this are to be sought in many areas, but a major one may be found, perhaps, in the neglect of the socio logical considerations attendant on jhum cultivation, as has been very cogently argued by Nunthara.