Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Uttarakhand's "ghost villages" reveal a gap between inclusion as discourse and governance. Despite statehood, out-migration persists as communities exit failed bureaucratic systems. This study argues that performative metrics and plains-centric models maintain structural exclusion in the hills.

Paper long abstract

In 2000, India created Uttarakhand as a separate state explicitly to include its marginalised hill populations in development through autonomous governance. The Uttarakhand statehood movement, spanning several decades, raised demands for recognition and responsive policies addressing the hill-specific challenges and development deficits as well as accelerating out-migration, which threatened the demographic viability of mountain communities. Twenty-five years later, over 2,000 hilly villages stand either empty or near-abandoned, and out-migration has intensified rather than reversed, clearly indicating the failure of inclusion and the state. This study examines these emerging trends in Uttarakhand and argues that out-migration from the hilly regions represents an active exit by the people from the state's inclusion narrative due to continuous marginalisation and exclusion.

Drawing on historical analysis and in-depth interviews, this study demonstrates that development policies designed for "inclusive growth" remained ineffective in tackling the everyday needs of hilly regions and people. The study identifies three critical failures: managerial inclusion that prioritises bureaucratic metrics over tangible benefits, political representation that lacks economic redistribution, and epistemic exclusion that imposes plains-centric development models while dismissing local hilly needs and knowledge.

The research reframes out-migration not merely as a policy failure, but as an assertion of agency, a refusal of development on the hilly region's terms. Similarly, those who remain behind, primarily the elderly population, stay largely invisible to the state. Ultimately, these ghost villages function as spatial manifestations of governance failure, revealing how bureaucratic rationalities can coexist with substantive exclusion.