ABSTRACT
The last round of field investigations in 11 villages in five districts of Arunachal Pradesh documents institutional diversity in almost every aspect of the agrarian economy. In Arunachal, landownership has for long been community-based, with institutional mechanisms like village councils to manage collective property rights over land and forest. There is a huge gap between the characteristics of the agrarian structure of Arunachal Pradesh that may be derived from the successive rounds of Agricultural Census data and the insights from field research. Arunachal's agriculture uses low levels of inputs and has low productivity. Arunachal's horticultural estates have been created by powerful local elites through enclosing the commons. The changing production relations in Arunachal Pradesh constitute a complex and multi-layered transition to capitalism, in which institutional diversity based on identity economics of a particular type, is at the core of the transformation process. The physical, cultural, political and economic specificities of Arunachal Pradesh play important roles in its agrarian transition.
