Living With Development : Adaptation, loss, and choice in Majuli and Meghalaya

Living With Development : Adaptation, loss, and choice in Majuli and Meghalaya

TANUZ KALITA

Development is inevitable. Every place grows through it, whether the pathway is tourism led expansion, large scale infrastructure, or resource-based interventions such as hydroelectric dams, coal extraction, and mining projects.

These interventions are usually framed as progress, promising jobs, better connectivity, and access to wider opportunities. Yet development does not arrive in empty spaces. It enters lived landscapes where people already share long standing relationships with land, water, forests, and each other.

It is therefore natural that development disrupts existing balances and dynamics. New jobs alter labour patterns, improved roads increase migration, accessibility opens doors to markets and tourists, and everyday life begins to move at a different pace.

Communities are not passive recipients of these changes. They actively negotiate development, selectively accepting certain forms while rejecting or reshaping others. This negotiated relationship with development is clearly visible in resource rich places like Majuli, the world’s largest river island.

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Majuli’s story is inseparable from erosion. The Brahmaputra has steadily eaten away at the island for decades, and government estimates suggest that Majuli has lost close to one third of its land area since the mid twentieth century. Entire villages have shifted, farmlands have disappeared, and long-term planning has become almost impossible. In such a fragile setting, development is not experienced as steady improvement but as a series of uncertain adjustments.

Agriculture, once the mainstay of livelihoods, no longer offers security. Unsurprisingly, many young people migrate to nearby cities such as Guwahati in search of salaried work, stability, and predictability. At the same time, migration is not the only response to development induced uncertainty. Alongside this outward movement, there is a quieter and less visible form of adaptation taking place.

Several individuals in Majuli are choosing to stay back and experiment with tourism, food and small-scale entrepreneurship. They use smartphones, social media platforms to promote homestays, local food, cultural experiences, and the rhythms of island life. Digital connectivity, often blamed for pulling young people away from rural areas, here becomes a tool for anchoring livelihoods locally. These individuals are not rejecting development. They are using its tools to build alternatives that allow them to remain rooted, even as others leave.

This choice complicates the dominant narrative around aspiration. Education, exposure, and connectivity do not automatically translate into a desire to migrate. For many, development is not about upward mobility in a city, but about creating dignity and income at home. The same young person who understands urban job markets and digital trends may still choose to invest in a homestay or community tourism initiative. Development, in this sense, is not linear. It does not push everyone in the same direction. It bends and reshapes itself according to local priorities, risks, and attachments.

A similar pattern of negotiation can be seen in Meghalaya, particularly along the Shillong Dawki Road corridor. Road construction has dramatically improved accessibility, connecting remote villages to urban centres and popular tourist destinations. Tourist numbers to riverine areas have increased sharply over the last decade, creating new income opportunities through boating, guiding, homestays, and small eateries. For many households, tourism has become an important supplement to farming and other traditional livelihoods. Development here has clearly expanded economic options and visibility.

However, this expansion has come with ecological costs. Hill cutting, soil dumping, and poorly planned drainage along the road have affected river systems, particularly during the monsoon. Local fishers consistently report a decline in water clarity and fish diversity in larger river stretches. State fisheries data also reflects a broader trend, with inland fish production in several parts of Meghalaya showing stagnation or decline over the past ten to fifteen years despite growing demand.

For communities that once depended on fishing for food and supplementary income, this represents a significant disruption. At first glance, this appears to be a straightforward story of development undermining traditional practices. Yet the reality on the ground is more layered. Fishing knowledge has not vanished entirely.

Instead, it has adapted to new ecological conditions. As fish populations decline in larger rivers, fishing increasingly takes place in running streams, waterfalls, and smaller channels that are less affected by sedimentation and construction. Indigenous techniques are modified, seasons are recalibrated, and knowledge is applied in new micro landscapes. It is not the death of traditional knowledge, but its transformation under pressure.

This adaptability highlights an important feature of development. Knowledge is not static. It evolves in response to changing conditions. Communities draw on what they know to navigate uncertainty and loss. In some cases, development even creates spaces where indigenous knowledge becomes more visible or valued, such as when tourists show interest in local fishing techniques or river-based livelihoods. Adaptation, however, should not be mistaken for resilience without limits.

There is a critical threshold beyond which adaptation cannot compensate for loss while practices can shift and techniques can be re- applied, knowledge tied to specific indigenous species cannot survive if those species disappear. Over time certain fishes vanish from rivers, the accumulated understanding of their behaviour, breeding cycles, and ecological roles fades with them. Development projects rarely account for this erosion. Roads, dams, and tourism infrastructure are designed to move people and capital efficiently. They do not care about species specific knowledge systems that have no immediate economic metric.

This distinction is crucial. Communities may continue to fish, farm, or engage in tourism, but the depth of ecological knowledge that once accompanied these practices becomes thinner over time. All that remains is a functional version of tradition, disconnected from the biodiversity that once sustained it. Across both Majuli and Meghalaya, these dynamics reveal why development cannot be understood in binary terms. It is neither wholly beneficial nor entirely destructive. It creates opportunities while narrowing choices. It enables certain forms of resilience while accelerating irreversible losses. Communities are not choosing between development and tradition. They are constantly negotiating how to live with development in ways that allow them to survive, stay, or adapt.

The problem lies in how development is planned and evaluated. Success is measured through infrastructure completed, tourist footfall, or income generated. Much less attention is paid to what disappears quietly in the process. Indigenous species, ecological relationships, and knowledge systems rarely feature in project reports or impact assessments.

Adaptation is often mistaken for acceptance, and silence for approval. Through this article, I highlight that while development is inevitable, its impacts are not neutral. Knowledge will continue to adapt and reshape itself in response to change but knowledge tied closely to indigenous species and fragile ecosystems will disappear over time if development continues to ignore ecological specificity.

This loss may not be immediate or visible, but it is cumulative and profound. Recognizing development as a negotiated and non-binary process is the first step. The next is acknowledging that some losses cannot be adapted away. If development does not begin to care for what it cannot easily measure, it risks leaving behind landscapes that are connected and accessible, yet ecologically and culturally impoverished.

Tanuz Kalita is a wildlife conservationist and anthropologist with over six years of experience working across the Eastern Himalaya and Indonesia. He has been a Fellow with the National Youth Climate Consortium and Yuwaah–India, and a delegate at LCOY and COY 2025. He currently consults on grassroots climate action and impact assessment, researches indigenous knowledge systems, and serves as a Storyteller Fellow in the Barak–Meghna River Basin with IUCN. His research focuses on the intersection of indigenous knowledge, climate action, and governance in Asia.

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