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Paper short abstract:

This study explores how Northeast India's rich cultural heritage can drive sustainable development. By integrating traditional knowledge, crafts, and practices with modern frameworks, it highlights innovative pathways to foster inclusive growth while preserving identity.

Paper long abstract:

Northeast India-a region of incredible rich cultural heritages and diversity in customs, traditions, and identities with the potential of leading sustainable development by integrating those into modern platforms. This paper evaluates the role that cultural heritage as a developmental tool takes to address some socio-economic and environmental challenges the region faces in relation to some traditional knowledge systems, indigenous crafts, folklore, festivals, and practices that depict the principles of sustainability.

Through an interdisciplinary approach, the study critically examines cases related to community initiatives, heritage-driven entrepreneurship, and policies that utilize culture as a platform for inclusive development, community up-liftment, and ecosystem resilience. In detail, the review focuses on some of the ancient and traditional crafts practiced in India-like the handloom, bamboo-based units, which protect cultural heritage yet produce livelihoods along with green culture.

It addresses the challenges of commodification of culture, loss of heritage through modernization, and the need for strong policies that balance development with preservation. The research is focused on the potential of cultural heritage to be a catalyst for progress by analyzing successful case studies and proposing a heritage-centered development model.

The study thus advocates for cooperative working, in which government bodies, local communities, and private enterprises should collaborate to take Northeast India's traditions and interlock them as a tapestry for sustainable development that is inclusive in its growth, making sure that the growth is stayed within the ethnicity of Northeast India.