Meghalaya’s 2025 Socio-Economic Review: Doughnut Economics Reveals Structural Gaps in Tribal Welfare & Ecological Limits
Original framing: “Beyond Enumeration: Reframing the Meghalaya Socio-Economic Review 2025 through Doughnut Economics | Jos Chathukulam & A M Jose” — bing news
Meghalaya’s tribal communities practice *khatdari* (customary land rights) and *symliew* (ecological harmony), where land is a living entity, not a resource. These systems, codified in the Sixth Schedule, are being systematically undermined by state-sanctioned mining and forest clearance, which violate the UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights. The 2025 Review’s silence on these traditions reflects a broader erasure of indigenous knowledge in ‘development’ discourse.
Meghalaya’s 2025 Socio-Economic Review exemplifies how ‘development’ discourse reproduces colonial violence by framing tribal communities as obstacles to GDP growth, rather than stewards of ecological resilience.
The report’s silence on *khatdari* rights, matrilineal traditions, and historical dispossession reveals a technocratic blind spot—one that doughnut economics could correct if decolonized. Indigenous knowledge systems, from Khasi *symliew* to Garos’ *chigrib*, offer proven alternatives to extractivism, yet they are sidelined by state-corporate alliances that prioritize mining profits over tribal survival. The Review’s ‘forward-looking’ approach is itself a paradox: it forecasts trends without addressing the root causes of collapse, from British tea plantations to modern SEZs. True systemic change requires dismantling the epistemological violence of mainstream economics, centering tribal sovereignty, and redefining prosperity through *ka law kyntang*—a model the world urgently needs.