Social Sector Development in North-east India is the first comprehensive book that makes a strong case for people-centric social sector development of North-east India. This book argues that human capital formation through social sector development should be the strategic goal of development of this region, as the prospect for service sector development is much higher compared to that of the primary and secondary sectors. This needs a course correction in the erstwhile approaches of development, which has been driven by political and strategic considerations such as national security and the territorial integrity of India. This book advances an argument for a shift in approach of development policy from top-down, infrastructure-focused to bottom-up, people-centric and social sector development-focused. It also critiques the mainstream understanding of North-east India that treats it as a geographical entity and a monolithic socio-cultural society, ignoring its rich ethnic diversities, cultural pluralities and regional variations.
Author Biography:
Ashok Pankaj is Professor and former Director at the Council for Social Development, New Delhi. He specializes in law and political economy of development. His edited books include: Right to Work and Rural India: Working of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) (SAGE Publications, 2012); Subalternity, Exclusion and Social Change in India (2014); and Dalits, Subalternity and Social Change in India (2018). He has contributed numerous articles and reviews to journals such as South Asia Research, Contribution to Indian Sociology, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, International Studies, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Social Scientist, Contemporary South Asia and Poverty in Focus, among others. Atul Sarma is currently Visiting Professor at the Institute for Studies in Industrial Development, New Delhi, and Chairman, OKD Institute for Social Change and Development, Guwahati. Formerly, he was Visiting Professor at the Institute for Human Development, New Delhi, Vice Chancellor, Rajiv Gandhi University, Itanagar, Member, Thirteenth Finance Commission, ICSSR National Fellow, and a Post-doctoral Fellow at MIT, Cambridge, USA. He was the Head, Delhi Centre, and Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute. He served as an independent Director in the Board of Directors of SAIL and as a Consultant to several international agencies such as ADB, FAO, ESCAP, IDRC and UNIDO. He was a Member of the Technology Development Board as also of Assam and Manipur State Planning Boards. He was President, Indian Econometric Society. His research interests include development economics, public finance and policy, macroeconomics and trade and development.
Besides contributing over 100 articles to various Indian and international journals and editing volumes in the areas of public finance and policy, trade, development economics, etc., he has published, singly or jointly, several books, including Exploring Indo-ASEAN Economic Partnership in Globalizing World. His latest books are Integrating the Third Tier in the Indian Federal System: Two Decades of Rural Local Governance
(2018) and Mainstreaming the Northeast in India’s Look and Act East Policy (Edited) (2018); String of Thoughts on North East India: An Economist’s Perspectives (2018); and Demonetisation: Claims and Reality (Edited) (2019). Antora Borah is a Research Associate in the Council for Social Development, New Delhi. She is currently pursuing her PhD on inter-community relations at the foothill border of Assam and Nagaland from the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi. She has contributed a number of articles on the North-east and authored a book, Assam-Nagaland Border Conflict in Foothills of Golaghat District: A Case Study (2013).
