To attain over all socio-economic development of a nation, it is very important that there is an all round state and regional development. This becomes apparent to India’s objective of attaining overall development particularly when we examine the growth and development aspects in the North-East Region (NER). India’s North-East Region consists of eight states namely Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura. The NER has a rich intricate cultural ethnicity with distinct languages and a diverse socio-cultural framework. With all its abundant availability of natural resources and rich potentials, it lacks economic development due to low agricultural productivity, poor infrastructure, unemployment, low income, poverty and slow growth of industries. It shares it borders with countries of China, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Burma which provides opportunities for cross border trade in today’s world of globalization. With all this in view, when the government announced its new economic policy in 1991, it also formulated ‘The Look East Policy’ in order to bring in closer economic integration with its eastern neighbors and in turn, attain economic development in the NER. The government in its attempt to strengthen ties with ASEAN wants to promote trade, investment and connectivity between the north eastern states and its international borders by emphasizing more on exports. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to understand the developmental aspects in this region and how the setting up of MSMEs would help in the improvement in the growth aspects of India in general and the NER in particular.
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