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Social Well-being, Ethnicity and Regional Development in Mizoram, Northeast India

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Abstract

Measurement of social well-being among deprived communities is crucial to assess the extent of marginalization and identify their needs for development and planning. In India, Scheduled Tribes are considered as one of the most marginalized and least developed communities. At the same time, their levels of well-being vary from one place to another which is relatively neglected and hardly examined. The present study is an attempt to assess levels of social well-being among tribes in Mizoram, Northeast India. It also examines the relationship between inequality, marginalization and autonomy movement in the state. Principal Component Analysis shows that minority tribes in the remote southern regions have shown relatively lower standard of living. The low level of well-being of ethnic minorities in the south is attributed to the process of peripheralization starting from the colonial period. The homelands of ethnic minorities in Mizoram coincide with the more peripheral, remote and less developed areas which are turning into ‘terrain of struggle’ due to inter-ethnic conflicts. The paper argued that provision of autonomous councils to the southern tribes in the post-Independence period has largely failed to reduce the gap between the dominant tribe in the north and the minority tribes in the south but rather encourages other communities to demand autonomy. Under this circumstances, it is advocated that the approach to decentralization in Northeast India and Mizoram in particular to be shifted from ethnic-based to place-based decentralization with emphasis on local development.

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Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Source: Census of India 2011

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Notes

  1. The Mizos can be classified into two broad groups – the Duhlian speaking Lusei and the non-Lusei communities like the Mara, the Lai, the Paihte, and the Hmar who speak both Duhlian and their own language or dialect. The Duhlian speakers comprise more than 70 per cent of the total population of the state.

  2. The Chakmas are the second largest linguistic communities Mizoram. The Mizos considered their rapid population increase in Mizoram, from 255 in 1911 to 17,497 in 1961 as per Census of India, as a demographic threat and many of them were pushed out to other states like Arunachal Pradesh and Assam (Hluna, 2001). Like the Chakmas, the Bru population has also increased rapidly from 51 in 1951 to 32,149 in 2011. In 1997, an inter-ethnic conflict between the Mizo and the Bru has resulted in mass outmigration of 35,000–40,000 Bru population from Mizoram to neighbouring state of Tripura (Roluahpuia 2018).

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Funding

This work was funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi, India [Grant reference F.No.:02/301/ST/2016- 17/RP]. The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest. This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography & Resource Management, Mizoram University, Aizawl, Mizoram, India

    Benjamin L. Saitluanga

  2. Department of Geography, Government Serchhip College, Serchhip, Mizoram, India

    Lal Hmangaihzela

  3. Department of Political Science, Government T. Romana College, Aizawl, Mizoram, India

    Joseph K. Lalfakzuala

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Saitluanga, B.L., Hmangaihzela, L. & Lalfakzuala, J.K. Social Well-being, Ethnicity and Regional Development in Mizoram, Northeast India. GeoJournal 87, 3277–3289 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-021-10436-z

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