The Difficult Transition

The interrelationship between economic development and gender relations has been found to be multidimensional and complex. This article attempts to analyse the changing gender relations in Arunachal Pradesh, a state that has seen rapid economic transformation in the past few decades, on the basis of women’s relative position in a few socioeconomic spheres. Although Arunachal Pradesh, like other north- eastern states, is generally described as having healthier gender relations than in many other states of India, such a general portrayal, the article has attempted to argue, not only hides the wide variations that exist among the north-eastern states, but also does not pay adequate attention to the continuing and emerging disparities in various dimensions of well-being and empowerment. While in terms of some indicators, women in Arunachal Pradesh have better status in relation to the males in the state as well as women in the country as a whole, clearly there are old and new spheres of marginalisation, segregation and discrimination. The most serious mismatch that emerges from the analysis of secondary data is the divergence between economic and political participation.