Globalisation, Urbanisation and Spatial Inequality in India with special reference to North East India

Abstract

Globalisation, an increasing international interaction in economic, political and cultural aspects, is a highly uneven set of processes whose impact varies over space, through time, and between social groups. On one hand, as globalisation seems to be an inevitable reality, many developing countries are restructuring their economies to receive and reap the benefits of widening and deepening global economic interactions. On the other hand, there are regions, which are increasingly excluded, and ‘structurally irrelevant’ to the current process of globalisation. Moreover, cities are at the core of development strategy of globalisation. While cities in developed countries are becoming centres of globally integrated organisation of economic activity, cities in developing countries are usually at disadvantage positions due to weak financial bases, low levels of technology as well as lack of infrastructural facilities and institutional factors.

The present paper, in the limelight of these contradictions, analyses the differential impacts of economic globalisation in cities and regions of India in general and Northeast India in particular. It is noted that the ushering of globalisation through structural adjustment of the economy during the 1990s has disparate impacts on various cities and regions of the country. The paper also examines the infrastructural constraints of cities of Northeast India as well as the existing institutional arrangements to ‘globalise’ the region through neoliberal reforms and investments.