Nagaland’s lone Rajya Sabha member KG Kenye has urged the Central government to revisit the set-up of North Eastern Council (NEC). Speaking in Rajya Sabha, Kenye said the original intent and objectives of having NEC, that came into being in 1972 as per an Act of Parliament, needed to be relooked and revisited.
While recollecting the visionary objectives of leaders of successive governments and Prime Ministers and their wisdom in creating the council, he said the original factors that had motivated them should be taken into account and acknowledged. Surrounded by five countries, he underlined that the Northeast was a very strategic region geo-politically.
Kenye recalled that when NEC was constituted, it had governors and chief ministers of the eight States of the region as members and where governors held the position of chairman on a rotation basis. Now, since they were all from the region, they understood the needs of the indigenous people of the region, which were deliberated and considered, and schemes/projects taken up on priority for implementation. That was the reason NEC came into being, he added.
He said after about two and half decades it was branched out as department of DoNER under the ministry of Home Affairs. And this became the administrative Unit monitoring the affairs of the NEC.
NLCPR was at the disposal of NEC for many years but in 2004 the department was converted into a full-fledged Ministry and the Ministry of DONER came into being, Kenye added.
Mentioning that there were many areas where NEC and DONER were overlapping in their administrative as well as financial powers, Kenye urged the Centre to review their functioning to make them more effective so that the benefits accrued to the people. He stressed that there had to be a serious streamlining in the working system.
Insisting that NEC should not be side-lined, he said the council was a very important regional planning body being represented by people of the region, who should be given due acknowledgement, and called for infusing it with fund and resources pooled from these ministries.
If schemes/projects were taken up and decided by NEC, he claimed these would plug 99% of loopholes that the fund was facing today. The Non-lapsable Central Pool Resources (NLCPR) Committee pulling various member from with this committee chooses the project how much and whom to give not to give or reject. This is the committee which advises the Minister of DONER as to how he should act or respond to the demand of the state.
He said it was highly inappropriate and unacceptable that a committee constituted by the Centre functioning in Delhi should be deciding the fate of the people of the region. He requested the Rajya Sabha chairman to advise DoNER to review its system of functioning.
As per the guideline, the MP said NLCPR Committee consisting of a few bureaucrats had substituted the performance and taken the role of NEC where the governors and chief ministers were its members. They were already deciding the size of the plan, choosing schemes and also made roadmap of the policy, he added.
The MP asserted that NEC was a statutory body whereas NLCPR was just an arrangement of DoNER, which could not overshadow the performance of the council that knew what it was doing and for what funds were there. This was stated in a press release by Kenye’s PRO.
Wednesday, July 16, 2025