The Northeast Notebook

Saving the migration cycleTHIS winter, school and college students in Jorhat in Upper Assam are using their holidays to spread an important ...

Saving the migration cycle
THIS winter, school and college students in Jorhat in Upper Assam are using their holidays to spread an important message. Working for an NGO, they are going from door to door telling people about the importance of saving the migratory birds that have come from as far as Siberia to spend two to three months on the banks of the Brahmaputra.

Socio-ecological and Health Welfare Association (SEWA), the NGO which earlier organised a training camp for students, has educated the youngsters on the need to protect the birds and now they are spreading the message.

Folklore’s growing power
FOLKLORE is so deeply entwined with the lives of the tribal communities in the Northeast that the Rubber Board has seized the stories and legends from their rich oral tradition to stop them from felling trees. And it has not stopped at that. The Board is now encouraging them to start rubber plantations in the countryside.

Story continues below this ad

Collective rubber farming has become a new culture particularly in the once-denuded hill slopes of the Bishalgarh sub-division with about 143 hectares of barren land now producing high-quality rubber. While 112 tribal families are already participating in this initiative, more will join this year.

Teachers in need of training
THERE is bad news for students in the Northeast; the region has the highest number of unqualified teachers. The latest report of the All India Educational Survey has said that hardly 45 per cent of the region’s nearly 2.66 lakh school teachers have any formal teacher training.

Assam and Nagaland have the highest number of such untrained teachers—nearly 70 per cent.

Nagaland’s war tourism
NAGALAND has discovered a new way to attract foreign tourists to the state that’s otherwise known more for its dismal law and order situation than anything else. The state tourism department has started promoting Nagaland as a state with numerous World War II landmarks. Kisama, a village about 12 kms from the state capital, has been declared a tourism village.

Story continues below this ad

And the new-found formula has already started paying dividends. In December alone, within a month of inauguration of the tourism village, Nagaland got as many as 200 tourists, most of them whom were war veterans from Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Festival of harvest
THE delicacies prepared during Bhogali bihu, the post-harvest festival that is celebrated in Assam in mid-January, have now gone commercial. The initiative has been taken by the North East Development Finance Corporation (NEDFi), whose haat—a new market complex in Guwahati—is where the villagers are vying for space to sell their delicacies. The bihu mela is already on and people from the city are descending on the NEDFi-haat in big numbers.