Moa Jamir
Twenty-five years after Nagaland adopted its Industrial Policy in 2000, the new Nagaland Trade, Investment and Industrial Policy (NTIIP) 2025 represents less a break with the past than an attempt to correct a longstanding implementation deficit.
The continuity is striking, as apparent from the mission statements. The 2000 policy sought “rapid and sustained industrial development” through investment, infrastructure, institutional support, incentives and better use of the State’s resources, with the ultimate aim of generating income and employment. Its objectives included entrepreneurship and skills, industrial infrastructure, exports, tourism, food processing, small enterprises and formalising cross-border trade with Myanmar.
The 2025 policy retains much of that ambition. Its mission is to create a business-friendly environment through simplified procedures and improved infrastructure, while promoting entrepreneurship, competitiveness, investment, employment and better living standards.
But the new policy itself provides perhaps the most important assessment of the previous quarter-century. It acknowledges that, despite Nagaland’s resources, reforms and strategic location, the desired growth in commerce and industry has not materialised and the industrial sector continues to make a low contribution to the State’s economy. It was consequently framed to revitalise trade, commerce and industry and replace the two-decade-old Industrial Policy 2000.
However, the achievement of the earlier policy, at best, is underperformance. The 2000 document envisaged Growth Centres, an Export Promotion Industrial Park, industrial estates, food parks, IT parks, integrated infrastructure centres and cold-storage facilities. The 2025 policy points to the Ganeshnagar Industrial Growth Centre, Agro& Food Processing SEZ, industrial estates, Industrial Infrastructure Development Centres (IIDCs), border trade centres and Toluvi Industrial Park as part of the State’s industrial infrastructure, among many others. However, many of these predate the 2000 policy.
Further, it should be clarified that the existence of new facilities, if any, cannot, by itself, be counted as evidence of the success of the 2000 policy.
Earlier assessments had already identified implementation and utilisation problems. Nagaland’s Vision 2030, for instance, observed that successive industrial policies had not yielded the desired results, citing weak implementation and monitoring, inadequate resources and poor inter-departmental convergence. More pointedly, contemporary reporting has described the border trade centres as largely inactive and Ganeshnagar’s SEZ as having struggled to become operational.
Thus, the pertinent question, given the core objectives of the NTIIP 2025, which among other things seeks to ‘build, strengthen and facilitate’ a sound industrial ecosystem, is not simply whether it will create more industrial infrastructure, but whether existing and new infrastructure will actually be utilised productively.
Curiously, the NTIIP 2025’s own rollout sits uneasily with its promise of Ease of Doing Business. Notified on May 8, 2025, its detailed implementation guidelines became publicly accessible only much later, with little visible public communication in the interim. For a policy whose central promise is a simpler, more accessible business environment, the manner of its rollout is itself worth scrutiny.
Moreover, Nagaland does not seem to lack policy measures, vision documents or similarly sounding policy initiatives. What it has repeatedly struggled with is converting those ambitions into reality. The challenge, therefore, is not necessarily another policy framework, but implementation that is timely, coordinated, accountable and capable of producing measurable outcomes.
As the NTIIP 2025 finally unveils in public domain, albeit in a curious hush-hush manner, the question is whether the new policy will mark a genuine departure from the past or eventually meet the same fate as the ambitious industrial promises and visions that have marked Nagaland’s policy landscape for decades.
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