Agricultural Sustainability in the North Eastern Region of India: A Sustainable Livelihood Security Index (SLSI) Approach

This paper offers an economic analysis of agricultural sustainability in the North Eastern Region (NER) of India by calculating the sustainable livelihood security index (SLSI) of each state. The SLSI serves as an important indicator for educating farmers and other stakeholders about sustainable agriculture production. This paper focuses on the NER as this region has received meagre attention in policy perspectives and is deprived in terms of various socio-economic and ecological indicators as compared to the rest of India. The findings show that various components of the SLSI, such as the ecological security index, economic efficiency index, and social equity index, have wide interstate variations. The agricultural sector in the NER has largely been neglected, with the state failing to adopt inclusive policies to uplift small and marginal farmers. The region suffers from severe poverty and malnutrition, improper management, over-exploitation of natural resources, and population explosion. These issues are a threat to agricultural sustainability. The study aims to identify the key factors that influence agricultural sustainability for inclusive and sustainable agricultural development. The findings show that the value of the SLSI ranged from 0.37 to 0.56 among the North Eastern states, which shows low agricultural sustainability. The indicators reveal that Tripura ranks first, with an SLSI score of 0.56, followed by Sikkim (0.50) and Assam (0.44). Manipur stood last in the SLSI ranking of North Eastern states, with a score of 0.37, which evidently shows the need for policy changes to enhance the sustainable development of agriculture.