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Paper short abstract

This paper re-thinks and re-examimes the idea of ‘development’ in India's Northeastern region against the backdrop of expanding natural resource extraction projects and its associated socio-ecological & Indigenous epistemological consequences.

Paper long abstract

India’s North-East region, a troubled frontier periphery and sandwiched between ‘Southeast Asian country’ and so-called ‘mainstream India,’ is oft-times peripheralized/marginalized in dominant narratives of Asian modernity and development. While the region is geographically located on the edge of Asia, its unique socio-political context, developmental challenges and the ongoing resource extraction projects challenges conventional notion of development. Against this background, this paper re-thinks the idea of ‘development’ in Northeast India against the backdrop of expanding natural resource extraction projects and its associated socio-ecological consequences. Drawing on the region’s experiences with hydrocarbon extraction, mining, larger dams, and forest-based interventions, the study argues that development in Northeast India has largely been pursued through externally imposed, resource-centric models that prioritize national growth and revenue over local livelihoods, ecological sustainability and Indigenous rights. Such extractive development has intensified land alienation, environmental degradation, and the erosion of customary institutions, particularly among Indigenous tribal communities whose lives are deeply intertwined with land, forests and water. By engaging with political ecology and decolonial perspectives, the paper foregrounds community narratives, resource politics & governance in Sixth schedule areas and everyday forms of resistance to show how extractivism is contested. The paper contends that re-thinking development in the light of natural resource extraction and when discussing about the Indigenous future under extractivism must go beyond extractivist logics towards ‘pluriverse’ and locally (territorially) grounded pathways that recognized Indigenous worldviews(epistemology and ontology) & sovereignty, ecological limits, more-than human histories and the lived realities of Northeast India.