When you hear northeast, what comes to your mind: A brilliant picture of unspoilt natural beauty, or the hard face of a Kalashnikov-wielding ULFA gunman? For decades, the menace of militancy has bloodied popular imagination about India’s devastatingly beautiful eastern fringe, chasing both tourists and businesses away from its largely unexplored bounties. Result: despite its abundant natural wealth, the northeast remains one of the nation’s least developed regions, marked by deep pockets of despair. On almost every count of economic well-being, per capita income, employment, spending, the region languishes in the doghouse, at the bottom of the barrel.
Slowly, however, the sun is beginning to break through over the eight star-struck states, as the clouds of militancy begin to blow over and India as a nation zips into an economic overdrive. Besides, with terror becoming a commonplace global phenomenon, the world is today obsessed less with sabotage and more with opportunities, particularly in virgin territories. That new-found dare, if you like, is as Indian as it is global—and it is not to be hijacked by fear.
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Clearly, therefore, the focus in India too is shifting from the region’s blood-spattered history of civil strife, to its wealth of natural resources: massive reserves of coal, crude gas and minerals that lie unexplored under its verdant grounds. In these bleak economic times, when the whole world is looking east for hope and revival, can India afford to behave any differently? For an answer we need only to look at PM Manmohan Singh’s recently unveiled Look East Policy, a document that charts out an elaborate road map for propelling the resource-rich region to an orbit of rapid growth.
Even regardless of the Look East policy, the traditionally snoozy air around the northeast is beginning to crackle with new-found energy, a bracing buzz of confidence as communities, entrepreneurs, NGOs and government bodies collaborate to help its literate, industrious but woefully poor people to get on their feet and run, if not alone then in clusters (See: Together They Profit).
Says an enthusiastic Prodip Borah: “I started my business in 1980 when the Assam agitation was in full swing but the state today is way more peaceful with the cases of insurgency led violence becoming a relative rarity. There isn’t a thing now that can stop investments from coming in.” Many in fact say, with some justification, that Imphal today is no more a dangerous a place than say Delhi or Mumbai.
This new-found feeling of “we-can-win” is catching fast, helped along, no doubt, by a slew of government schemes, incentives and policies designed to fire up investments and business in the region. The union government plans to invest a massive `50,000 crores on just building roads in the region over the next five years! This is in addition to plans that could transform connectivity all over the northeast, across all modes: air, rail, road and telecom. Then there are several juicy sops that make investing in the region a mouth-watering proposition.
Sure, there is a huge downside to all this. Be it the length of its creaky road network, airports, or hotel rooms, the northeast is woefully underserved, and lags far behind national averages. Just take roads for example. The NER has about 282456 km of roads, which on the face of it, is certainly not bad. The northeast makes up only about 8 per cent of the country’s total area and yet has 10 per cent of its roads. Exceptional! But here is the reality: Assam alone accounts for 68 per cent of all the roads in the northeast! The scenario is just as bad when it comes to banks, telephony, hospitals or railways: The northeast, in one word, is underserved.
But that is precisely why we ought to be excited: there is so much to do out there, such massive opportunities to capitalize on ((See: Peaks of Opportunity...). There are roads, hotels, hospitals, power plants, airports, factories and everything else you can imagine to be built on unimaginable scales. What will all this be worth as a business opportunity? Start counting. Or, better still start investing.
Look at just one state at a time to get something like a realistic idea of what lies ahead. Arunachal Pradesh has the potential to produce over 50,000 MW of hydel power, which is a good 25 per cent of all the energy the nation aims to generate by 2020. And guess what the entire northeast currently generates: a little over 2000 MW! In other words, if the region were to get anywhere close to realizing its gargantuan potential, the business will be worth many countless billions of dollars.
Indeed, northeast observers are just as breathless about the dozens of medium and small scale units that are likely to burst into life in the wake of those giant power and steel plants, feeding on their spin-offs. The opportunity is massive for players in a whole range of sectors from packaging and petrochemicals. And this is just power, and only Arunachal Pradesh.
What about the fabled tea gardens of Assam and Darjeeling? The floating lake of Manipur that harbours the world’s only mid-water wild-life sanctuary? And the massive reserves of coal, limestone and uranium in Meghalaya...the list is endless and so are the opportunities. Nowhere are these opportunities more promising than in the region’s budding micro, small and medium scale (MSME) sector, that finds a special mention in the Look East policy and now has the backing of a dedicated task force (see: On the drawing “bored”).
Still, it is clear that the road ahead for the northeast remains uphill and at places treacherous. There are painful memories to erase and many bridges to be built before the eight states of the region can hope to move as one. But amidst all the historic worries and a painful legacy of social unrest, it will be safe to say that beautiful northeast is finally beginning to break out of the shadows of isolation and finding a place for itself in the sun. There are brave-hearts out there making those rockets—-we met them.
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