Northeast India

Northeast India is the eastern-most region of India connected to East India via a narrow corridor squeezed between Nepal and Bangladesh. It comprises the contiguous Seven Sister States—Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura—and the Himalayan state of Sikkim. These states are grouped under the MDONER ministry of the Government of India. Except for the Goalpara region of Assam, the rest were late entrants to political India—the Brahmaputra valley of Assam became a part of British India 1824, and the hilly regions even later. Due to cultural and historical reasons parts of North Bengal (districts of Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri, and Koch Bihar) are often included in Northeast India. Sikkim was recognized as a part of North-East states in the 1990s.

Linguistically the whole region can widely be distinctly differentiated into two portions: one region is characterised by speakers of Asamiya or Assamese which is written and spoken in Assam Valley and other parts and indeed one of the most recognised and established language systems that dates back to 900c and traces its origin from Charyapada; the other region which essentially includes the rest of the states with preponderance of Tibeto-Burman languages however, to this exception could be Tripura where Bengali is spoken due to the heavy influx of immigrants from Bangladesh who have now marginalized the indigenous tribal population.However, Bengali was official language in princely Tripura and a large part of East Bengal (now Bangladesh) is Tripura kings' Jamindari. Bengali is also language of almost one third population of Assam, apart from that, parts of Nagaland, Manipur, Arunachal also have Bengali speaking people. Meghalaya, affectionately called as Northeast India's Scotland, is a Bengali word itself and there too has been Bengali population. The other prominent languages of the region are Naga, Manipuri,Mizo, Kakborok, Khasia,Arunachali, etc The states are officially recognized under North Eastern Council (NEC) constituted in 1971 as the acting agency for the development of the eight states. The North Eastern Development Finance Corporation Ltd (NEDFi) was incorporated on August 9, 1995 and the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER) was set up in September 2001.

The Siliguri Corridor in West Bengal, with an average width of 21 km to 40 km, connects the North Eastern region with the mainland Indian sub-continent. The region shares more than 4500 kilometres of international border (about 90 per cent of its entire border area) with China (South Tibet) in the North, Mayanmar in the East, Bangladesh in the South-West, and Bhutan to the North-West.