Viksit Bharat Must Not Leave Indigenous India Behind

India’s ambition to become a developed nation by 2047 is usually discussed through the language of economic growth, infrastructure, technology, manufacturing and global competitiveness, but there is another question that deserves equal attention as the country races towards that milestone: what will India carry with it from the knowledge, memory and wisdom accumulated by its communities over centuries? 

Development cannot be measured only by what a nation succeeds in building. It must also be measured by what it has the wisdom to preserve while building.

That question found an interesting setting in Manipur when NITI Aayog Member Dr Joram Aniya spoke on “Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Viksit Bharat 2047” at a societal development lecture organised by the Institute of Bioresources and Sustainable Development (IBSD), Imphal, a constituent institute of the Biotechnology Research and Innovation Council (BRIC), at its Takyel campus. 

Her central argument was simple but important: a large section of Indian society continues to remain connected with indigenous ways of life through villages and communities, and the knowledge accumulated over generations should neither disappear with the older generation nor remain frozen in the past. It needs to be preserved, studied scientifically and, wherever evidence supports it, made relevant to the needs of future generations.

This conversation has particular significance in the Northeast, where communities have lived for generations with forests, hills, rivers, wetlands and extraordinary biological diversity. Knowledge about medicinal plants, traditional agriculture, seasonal changes, seeds, food, forests and the sustainable use of natural resources did not always originate in laboratories or enter academic journals, but much of it emerged from repeated observation and lived experience. 

That does not mean every traditional belief should automatically be accepted as scientific truth, just as it would be equally unwise to dismiss knowledge merely because it came from an oral tradition rather than a modern institution. The more meaningful approach is to document what communities know, subject it to scientific examination and create a meeting ground between inherited experience and modern research.

This is where institutions such as IBSD can play a larger role. Indigenous knowledge and modern science need not stand on opposite sides of the development debate, because one can provide generations of observation while the other provides methods to test, validate, refine or reject those observations. 

When such collaboration is conducted respectfully, the outcome can extend beyond preservation into agriculture, biodiversity conservation, healthcare, climate resilience and sustainable livelihoods. Equally important, the communities from which such knowledge originates must remain participants and beneficiaries of that process rather than becoming merely subjects from whom knowledge is collected.

Dr Aniya’s visit was not confined to the academic conversation. During her engagements in Manipur, she met Governor Ajay Kumar Bhalla and Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand Singh and interacted with senior officials of the state administration. Her discussions with the Chief Minister included Manipur’s development priorities and the proposed State Institute of Transformation under NITI Aayog, giving the visit a policy dimension alongside her engagements with indigenous knowledge, heritage and the ecological landscape. She also interacted with people beyond the formal corridors of administration, making the visit an opportunity to encounter different faces of Manipur rather than viewing the state only through official presentations.

Her journey to Moirang gave this wider engagement a historical dimension. Dr Aniya and her team visited the historic INA Headquarters and INA Museum, places that preserve Manipur’s important connection with India’s freedom struggle. Moirang occupies a special place in that history as the place where the Indian National Army flag was hoisted on Indian soil in April 1944. For a visitor from one of India’s highest public policy institutions, standing there is also a reminder that some of the defining chapters of the Indian story unfolded far away from the political centres from which that story is usually narrated.

From Moirang, the journey moved almost naturally from history to nature as the team travelled across Loktak Lake and later visited Keibul Lamjao National Park, the remarkable floating marvels, that provides the natural habitat of the endangered Sangai. Prof Khelena Gurumayum, Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science at Manipur University, who was with Dr Aniya during this part of the visit, recalled the joy of seeing five Sangai on the floating phumdis. The journey also carried a personal warmth as the two revisited memories of their Delhi University days while travelling through a landscape where history, community and ecology remain deeply intertwined.

Dr Aniya’s visit to Shree Shree Govindajee Temple added another dimension to the journey. The temple is not merely one of Imphal’s prominent religious landmarks but part of a living heritage through which faith, history, architecture and collective memory continue to meet. 

Coming during the same Manipur visit in which she spoke about the importance of preserving indigenous knowledge, the experience offered another reminder that preservation cannot be confined to what can be stored in laboratories, libraries or museums. A society also carries its inheritance through places of worship, historical spaces, cultural practices and the memories attached to them.

Seen together, the IBSD lecture, the policy engagements, Moirang, Loktak, Keibul Lamjao and Govindajee Temple were therefore more than disconnected stops during a visit to Manipur. They formed an almost natural journey through the larger question raised by Viksit Bharat itself — how a country can move confidently towards modernity without allowing development to erase the knowledge, history, faith, biodiversity and cultural memory that give its different regions their distinctive identities.

For too long, much of the national conversation about the Northeast has been framed through borders, insurgency, ethnic conflict, connectivity and strategic geography. Those realities cannot be ignored, particularly in a region that has experienced prolonged instability, but they are not the complete story of the Northeast. The region is also one of India’s richest repositories of languages, biodiversity, cultural practices, agricultural traditions and indigenous knowledge. 

If Viksit Bharat is genuinely intended to draw strength from every part of the country, the Northeast should not continue to be imagined merely as a distant region waiting for development to arrive from New Delhi. It should also be recognised as a region capable of contributing knowledge, experience and ideas to India’s development.

There is urgency in doing so because the chain through which indigenous knowledge survived for generations is becoming increasingly fragile. Young people are moving away from villages, traditional occupations are changing, languages are under pressure and forests, wetlands and other natural landscapes are undergoing rapid transformation. 

Much of the knowledge carried by older generations remains undocumented, and when the last person possessing a particular tradition or understanding disappears, no government scheme, university project or digital archive can completely reconstruct what has been lost. Documentation therefore cannot begin only after something has become endangered enough to require rescue.

India needs a much deeper partnership among universities, scientific institutions and indigenous communities, with young researchers encouraged to document traditional knowledge in local languages as well as in forms accessible to modern research. 

Where medicinal plants, biological resources or commercially valuable knowledge are involved, the rights and contribution of the communities must be recognised and protected. Preservation cannot become another process in which knowledge leaves the village, enters an institution and eventually returns as a product from which the original custodians receive neither recognition nor benefit.

The same principle applies to heritage and ecology. A historic site is not merely an old building waiting for tourists, just as a wetland is not simply water available for economic use and a sacred landscape is not empty land awaiting another project.

Moirang carries the memory of the freedom struggle; Govindajee Temple carries layers of faith, history and cultural continuity; Loktak sustains communities and an extraordinary ecosystem; and Keibul Lamjao protects a species that has become inseparable from Manipur’s identity. Development that fails to understand these relationships may create infrastructure while quietly impoverishing the society around it.

Perhaps this is the larger message that Dr Joram Aniya’s visit to Manipur can carry beyond the Northeast. India does not have to choose between tradition and technology, nor between indigenous knowledge and scientific inquiry. A confident country should be capable of examining inherited knowledge without romanticising it, testing it without disrespecting the communities that preserved it and using what proves valuable without severing it from those who carried it across generations.

By 2047, India will certainly look different from the country we know today. There will be new cities, technologies, industries and ways of living, and many of those changes will be necessary. Yet Viksit Bharat will ultimately mean more than the India we succeed in constructing over the next two decades. 

It will also be defined by whether, in the urgency to build the future, we were wise enough to recognise what from our past was worth carrying with us.