Description
Online Buying Price: £ 11.95; INR 375; $ 19.95
Forced Migration in North East India: A Media Reader is a comprehensive ready reference and toolkit for journalists, researchers, and people in general – who are interested in the media and North East India.
The region, though geographically isolated and economically underdeveloped, has a distinctive cultural, socio-economic and political identity. Viewed from within, it represents an incredible diversity comprising over 200 indigenous communities.
As the states in North East India have borders with several countries – China, Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh – since vivisection of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the region has faced waves of population influx from across the borders at various times. Forced migration and displacement due to repeated ethnic violence have led to hundreds of villages being burnt and thousands of people killed. The figure of internally displaced persons in the region has surpassed the half a million mark according to a recent estimate.
Besides ethnic conflicts, natural calamities such as floods and erosion, as well as construction activities or eviction in the reserve forest areas have added to the misery of the displaced persons in North East India, many of whom are languishing in the temporary camps for decades.
However, the issue often does not get due coverage in the media, and many journalists feel that the resources, tools and skills to cover this issue at their disposal are inadequate. The Media Reader is an effort to bridge this gap.
Nilanjan Dutta is a journalist based in Kolkata. He has worked for more than 20 years for the dailies The Times of India and Amrita Bazar Patrika, and weeklies Sunday and Current. Nilanjan conducted research on forced migration and produced a well-acclaimed documentary, Home is a Distant Land, on Bengali refugee memories in collaboration with the Department of Sociology, University of Wollongong, Australia (2010). Having a keen interest in human rights, Dutta has also researched on the History of Civil Liberties Movement in India with a fellowship from the Department of Law, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London during 1995-96. He is an Honorary Research Associate of the Calcutta Research Group.
