What Assam Teaches India About Inclusive Growth

During my visits to Assam in 2025 and in the conversations around Advantage Assam 2.0, one thing became very clear to me: Assam is not a peripheral region. Assam is a bridge.

Anyone who still sees the region merely as a distant periphery is reading neither its geography nor its political significance correctly. The investment summit of 25–26 February 2025 made this new self-understanding visible. But more important to me than any stage was the reality behind it: Assam is now being explicitly understood as a link between the rest of India, the Northeast, Bangladesh, and onward to Southeast Asia. Roads, waterways, and new logistics corridors are actively reinforcing this vision.

What impressed me most in Assam was the structure of the everyday economy.

In many parts of the world, women are still discussed as a target group of development. In Assam, one has to be more honest: women already carry large parts of the economy. In the handloom sector, the second-largest employer after agriculture, around 1.283 million weavers are engaged in production. Approximately 1.179 million of them are women.

That fact alone changes the perspective. When an economy produces on this scale through women, women's empowerment is no longer a side issue. It becomes a central question of productivity, income, and market development. This strength does not begin in the shop or at the point of export. It begins much earlier. With seeds. In agriculture. In sericulture. In the tea-growing regions.

It was there that I understood why Assam matters so much to the debate on inclusive growth.In the tea garden regions, women's self-help groups are not simply organized; they are brought into real economic roles. The so-called Nutrition Shops in the tea estates are owned by women's self-help groups and run by their members. They combine basic services with income and financial inclusion.

For an investor, this may seem small. For a society, it is not.It shows how value creation emerges from the ground up.

Tea itself tells an industrial story in Assam, and a social one.

In 2025, the 200-year history of Assam Tea was officially celebrated. At the same time, the Mega Jhumoir made Tea Tribe and Adivasi communities more visible as part of that history.

I believe this is an important point.A mature economy does not separate its production history from the people who made it possible. Assam is beginning to do exactly that more consciously. It connects industry, memory, and community. Perhaps that is why the economy here feels less abstract than in many other regions. For me, this is also where the real question of the future lies.

It is not enough to see women as strong participants in production. They must be able to move up the entire ladder: from producer to brand owner, from self-help group member to entrepreneur, from local value creation to strategic decision-making.

There are already signs that Assam is taking this direction.

Programs for women farmers, self-help group structures, direct procurement of traditional products, and platforms for women-led startups are creating links between the grassroots economy and the entrepreneurial economy.

At the same time, Assam openly acknowledges the obstacles: limited resources, insufficient access to mentoring, and gaps in management and finance. For that very reason, the direction is the right one.The discussion shifted from participation to ownership and leadership.

Assam teaches another lesson that is often lost in growth debates: Culture is value.

The list of geographically protected products reads like an alternative economic strategy: Muga Silk, Gamosa, Majuli Masks, Majuli Manuscript Paintings, Bodo Aronai, Bodo Dokhona, Assam Jaapi, Asharikandi Terracotta, Sarthebari Metal Craft, and many more.

This is not nostalgia.It is a model in which origin, craftsmanship, and identity become marketable without losing their dignity.

For me, this is one of the most important lessons from Assam. A modern economy should not erase tradition. Traditional practices need to be observed and understood to become a source of innovation that generates wealth and impact for the people, their communities, and the ecosystems of the region.

The same is true for nature.

Assam possesses immense forest and wetland resources, seven national parks, eighteen protected areas, a Ramsar wetland, and Biodiversity Heritage Sites.

Anyone who spends time there quickly understands that biodiversity in Assam is not a backdrop.It is the foundation of livelihoods, local identity, and economic stability.

Programs working at the intersection of conservation and livelihoods show that this is where a serious path for the future can be found. When women from forest-edge communities are trained, connected to government programs, and linked to markets through production clusters, this is not a soft social project.It is economic infrastructure. For that reason, Assam should not be romanticized. This region lives with floods, erosion, climate pressures, and social deficits that must be part of any honest analysis.

Inclusive growth here is not a finished condition.It is a continuous task carried out under difficult circumstances. But perhaps that is precisely why Assam is so important for India and pancontinental. Because here it becomes visible that the economy of the future will not be built only in metropolitan centres, technology parks, and large balance sheets.It will also be built where communities, women, culture, and nature have long been treated as peripheral issues.

Assam shows that these so-called margins may in fact become the starting point of a more resilient model of growth.If India wants to understand what the economy of the future might look like, it might not only look inward to its major centers.It might also look east.To Assam. Because a different model of development is already taking shape there: less extractive, more community-based, more deeply rooted in culture, more ecologically aware, and carried to a much greater extent by women. For me, the most important lesson from Assam is therefore simple: The future will not be built by excluding the margins.It will be built from the margins inward.

by Dr. h.c. Anja Carron,

Global Leader, Entrepreneur