Land Issues and Liberalisation in Northeast India

Abstract

Liberalisation reached much of the Northeast when the region was in the midst of three different processes of an interface between the traditional and modern land management systems that had resulted in several ethnic conflicts around the land. The first was an encroachment on tribal land by immigrants. The second is the interface of community-based customary land management with the formal individual-based system through commercial crops leading to internal land alienation within the tribes and landlessness of many. The third is internal land alienation by a few leaders using the customary formal interface to their own benefit. These two types of interface together resulted in class formation and stronger patriarchy in the hitherto egalitarian tribes, a process that has further intensified under liberalisation.