WHILE WELCOMING the Government of India’s move under the leadership of Dr Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of India to reorganise Andhra Pradesh and create the new Telangana state, the All Bodo Students Union (ABSU), has demanded reorganisation of most of the Indian states with special reference to Assam to facilitate the creation of separate state of Bodoland.
"The reorganisation of Indian states and persuasion for smaller states as a national policy will be for the benefit of the country because it will narrow down the regional imbalance and disparity in economic growth and social development," said Pramod Boro, president of ABSU.
He also said that the sense of alienation amongst the various ethnic and linguistic groups will be removed only when the larger states are bifurcated and administrative set up become easily manageable. So far the issue of area, population and economic distributions into the form of states in India are concerned, the absence of uniform principle to that regard enflames the feeling of deprivations and discriminations within the sentiments of ethnic as well as the down trodden, suppressed or oppressed community and very often it leads to an ethnic unrest in the country.
It is a fact that a good number of provincial states in India are too large in terms of area or population and they are proved to be quite unmanageable from the administrative point of view. The administrative failure causes failure to the law and order and so as the security to the lives and properties of the people in general. It also causes the socio-economic and political failure as far as the keeping up of good governance and democratic polity is concerned. The nation should adopt the policy to redesign its geographical territory to facilitate more number of new states in its map so that cries for state and ethnic autonomy come to a logical conclusion.
The demand for a separate state of Bodoland is always backed by strong logic, justification, physical feasibility and economic viability. Its boundary forms along the Indo-Bhutan and Assam-Arunachal border area comprising 25000 sq km land area from the Sonkosh in the West to the Sadiya in the East. Along with the four complete districts of present BTAD- Kokrajhar, Chirang, Baksa and Udalguri, eight other districts namely Dhubri, Bongaigaon, Barpeta, Nalbari, rural Kamrup, Darrang, Sonitpur, Lakhimpur, Dhemaji and Dibrugarh are also partially included.
At present the BTAD and rest of the areas have approximate 30 to 20 lakh population respectively that makes 50 lakh total population of the proposed Bodoland. With its wild life sanctuaries like Manas, Nanai, Barnadi, Orang, Nameri National park, the proposed Bodoland area has vast green forest covered land area. The rich forest properties generate huge revenue and it has tremendous potentials for tourism economy also. Agriculturally the Bodoland is more than self sufficient in rice production, tea industry is very rich, the BRPL, Dhaligaon and NTPC mega power project, Salakati are two major leading petroleum and power based industries in the Bodoland area. In a nutshell the creation of Bodoland state will not be a burden for the nation rather it will be beneficia, a press release issued by ABSU said.