The fact that there is a wide knowledge gap among the people of the rest of the country regarding the Northeast, its history and its people can hardly be contested. It has remained so since decades and although thanks to the social media platforms which provide visual-based documentaries, made mostly by the travel vlogs nowadays, there is at least the dissemination of more information about the region. Notwithstanding the honest intention of these initiatives, it must be underlined that they manage to bring an effect on the minds of the viewers which is of a fleeting nature only. The most agreeable route in making the Northeast known to the rest of the country can only be the printed words and the history books covering the school syllabi will be the perfect ones. There has been uninterrupted and inexplicable apathy to give the region a place in the national school curricula and it’s a welcome sign that the initiative has been taken at a very high level, at the sixth Governing Council meeting of the NITI Aayog by Arunachal Pradesh. While it remains to be seen how seriously the suggestion is taken by the Centre, its urgent necessity can never be doubted. 
The need for including the history of the Northeast in the education materials of schools, especially those managed by the central boards have been argued time and again by the educationists across different branches and not just historians. The commonality in the curricula of the school history books is that the pages have been restricted only to the mainstream Indian historical narratives, of those about ancient kingdoms, family trees of kings and their dynasties. While these are all necessary to know the India of the past, generations after generations of learners have missed the opportunity to know about that part of the country without which the idea of a national totality can never be realized. The quality of knowledge of an average mainland citizen about the Northeast is also abysmally low and it’s an extreme rarity for many of them to pronounce the names of the constituent states in one breath. The great knowledge gap can only be reduced by an inclusive syllabi and the proposal should be viewed as a solid step to bridge the ‘gap’, an exhaustive term that applies for the Northeast, spread over wide-ranging factors, well beyond the connotations of Geography. It’s also a matter of fact that the region gets prominently covered by the national media only when there are eruptions of violence, militancy or for other wrong reasons, whereas the stories of pains, aspirations, history and culture of its people are rarities.
If the former (refusal in syllabi) is the beginning of the circle of an unending detachment, the latter, in the broader context, completes it. The Centre must consider the proposal urgently. 

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Kenter Joya Riba

(Managing Editor)
      She is a graduate in Science with post graduation in Sociology from University of Pune. She has been in the media industry for nearly a decade. Before turning to print business, she has been associated with radio and television.
Email: kenterjoyaz@easternsentinel.in / editoreasternsentinel@gmail.com
Phone: 0360-2212313

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