The Northeast Notebook

Cramping Kaziranga8217;s style THE 430 sq km Kaziranga National Park, home to the highly endangered one-horned rhinoceros, is facing encroa...

Cramping Kaziranga8217;s style

THE 430 sq km Kaziranga National Park, home to the highly endangered one-horned rhinoceros, is facing encroachment and erosion. Bangladeshi migrants are causing the first problem and the Brahmaputra is responsible for the second.

A scheme to extend the Park area by an additional 429 sq km still lies incomplete with NGOs complaining that the Congress regime in the state does not want to touch the migrants who constitute the party8217;s vote bank. Conservation efforts have yielded an increase in the numbers of animals in the Park but there appears to be little space to accommodate them.

Destination Tawang

WITH Tawang, tucked in the snowclad Eastern Himalayas of Arunachal Pradesh, emerging as a favourite with tourists, the state government has moved New Delhi to let foreign visitors stay for 30 days instead of ten days permitted under the existing Restricted Area Permit RAP rules. Last year for instance, Tawang had over 3,000 foreign tourists, most of them from Germany, US and southeast Asia.

Four days and a festival

STARTING Thursday Guwahati will play host to a four day festival of ankiya bhawona, a traditional form of theatre that dates to the 16th century. A unique fusion of music, dance and drama, the festival will for the first time also feature troupes from various ethnic groups that include the Bodo, Mishing and Nepali communities.

Bhawona is enacted regularly in the 700 odd satras8212;monasteries8212;scattered all over Assam that serve as centres of art and culture apart from imparting religious discourses.

Showcase success stories: CII

HOW can the northeastern states improve their image? The Confederation of Indian Industry CII has an answer: showcase the entrepreneurship success stories of the region and this will attract potential investors.

The CII gave this mantra when chief ministers of the eight states met at Gangtok last week for a crucial Northeastern Council NEC meeting that discussed various common developmental projects in the region. The success stories can be a way to edge out all the abductions stories that seem to pour out of the northeast.