Society / Northeast

NEW DELHI, April 26—For the North-east rock music is folk music, so said the organisers and the first-ever Doordarshan (DD) North-east Music Fest began with a bang that left the music lovers rocking like never before. If the DD, Department of Development of the North Eastern Region (DONER) and Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan (NYKS), the organisers of the event were looking for a subject to showcase the other face of the trouble-torn North-east, they sure hit the target, as students, youths off-duty executives and tourists swayed to the hipswinging numbers by rock bands from the eight North eastern...

NEW DELHI, April 18 — Launching of massive marketing campaign to promote North Eastern Region (NER) as a tourist destination, contradict the performance of the Tourism Ministry, as funds allocated for the Region for development and promotion of tourism go unutilised during the last financial year. The Departments of Tourism and the Region’s State Governments seem yet to wake up from the intertia, as funds go waste but no perceptible improvement on the ground so much so that exercises to fully explore the tourism potential of the region are yet to be undertaken.

The Department of Tourism has...

Agartala, April 16: He is the “son of a coronated king”, to say the least, but in Bangladesh, he is known only as chief of his tribal subjects, the Chakmas.

A successful lawyer in the Bangladesh supreme court, 39-year-old Raja Debasish Roy feels in a modern democracy the title of a king is redundant.

The strapping raja was here as the special guest for the three-day “Bijhu” (new year) festival of the Chakma tribe of Tripura.

He took part in the traditional festivities in the remote Jharjharia village under Natun Bazar police station of South Tripura.

Before returning to Bangladesh, he...

Guwahati, April 12: The North Eastern Development Financial Corporation Ltd (NEDFi) has launched a special drive to help women entrepreneurs in the Northeast during this fiscal year.

Disclosing this to newspersons last night, NEDFi chairman-cum-managing director J.P. Saikia said the premier financial institution, which assists self-employment in the region, plans to train over 200 entrepreneurs with special emphasis on the fairer sex.

“We will be holding five training programmes exclusively for women and those who successfully complete the course will be given financial assistance under our...

GUWAHATI, April 11 — Proper explorations along the different routes which had connected the North eastern region with Myanmar, China, Tibet and other South-Asian countries and the mainland India, may lead to discovery of large number of ancient settlements. The river valleys of the Brahmaputra and the Barak and their tributaries are important hence for archaeological exploration.

These are the observations made by Syed Jamal Hasan, Superintending Archaeologist, Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Guwahati Circle and Sri Bimal Sinha, Assistant Archaeologist, ASI, Guwahati Circle, in a paper...

GUWAHATI, April 9 — “People must be laughing at our products,” says the president of the Association of Tour Operators of North East India (ATONEI) Lata Umrey, a sad but candid admission that the North East has not yet matured as a favoured destination for tourists. This despite the fact that the region has to offer almost anything that a tourist may possible want. The problems are many.

It is to address these issues that the ATONEI, along with the North Eastern Council (NEC) is hosting a two-day North East Tourism Summit in Shillong from tomorrow. Tourism in the North East as a “gateway to...

Guwahati, April 1: A first-time visitor to this capital city could end up checking into a hospital if he is guided by the website addresses mentioned in the latest of the “Incredible !ndia” advertisement series of the Central department of tourism.

The “where to stay” page under the “Guwahati” link of www.tourismofindia.com mentions Hotel Samrat in the “supplementary accommodation” category.

Actually, Hotel Samrat was closed down in 1999 and converted into an endolaparoscopic surgical research institute on June 15 the next year.

Umpteen factual errors litter www.tourismofindia.com and www...

GUWAHATI, March 20— It has the animals that slither and also the ones that claw their ways up. For it is a documentary film on the reptiles— the reptiles of North-East India. This documentary film— Friends for ever: Common Reptiles of North-East India, directed and produced by Sri Dip Bhuyan, an M Sc in Statistics from Delhi University, has once again provided the documentary proof that there is no dearth of talent or lack of determination among our youths. Sri Bhuyan is associated with documentary films for the past about 11 years.

Assam or for that matter the entire NE region, has remained...

NEW DELHI, March 19 — The Department for Development of North Eastern Region (DONER) is exploring several options including handing over the B Baruah Cancer Hospital to private sector, even as Minister incharge, Dr CP Thakur, advocated special incentives to attract medical experts to the region.

Returning from his maiden tour of the North-East, the Minister has redrawn his list of ‘things to do’ updating it with the feedback he received in the three States of Mizoram, Meghalaya and Assam.

However, the Health Minister in him seems to have taken precedence as he broadly outlined his plans to...

ITANAGAR, March 14 — Prof MGS Narayanan, Chairman, Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), was said historical records by British officials on North-east were devoid of a historical perspective, reports PTI. Inaugurating a three-day national seminar here on ‘Sources of History of Arunachal Pradesh’, Prof Narayanan said much significance cannot be attached to the British records on the region as they were not based on source materials like archaeological finding and has neglected the oral history of the people and their cultural aspects.

Anthropological findings by the British had a...