Written by a serving IAS officer of the Nagaland cadre, this book deals with the geography, demography, and economic potential with the author's author's, statistics and insight of an experienced administrator. The book describes the 'Geographic Realities of the North-East', The People' and 'Economy & Development' before coming to the core issue of 'Strategic Importance of the Area', The immigration problem, securing the border, the problem of insurgency with a detailed analysis of the situation in each state leads to the chances of peace in the region. Dealing with the 'Impact of India's Relations with Neighbouring Countries' in the next chapter, the author has given more weightage to India-China relations and understandably so. China's actions in this region in the last half-a-century have been a cause of concern for India. The author has very rightly focused on the territorial issues that China keeps triggering in this region including its claims over Arunachal Pradesh. The author briefly discusses the 'Act East Policy' of the Government before coming to the final chapter 'The Way Ahead'. Tourism is one of the important keys to development of North East. One could not have a better scholar than Dr. Bhalla to dwell on this aspect simply because he is an authority on tourism in North East and has two published works on this topic to his credit. While there are many published works on north-eastern states available in libraries, none is more contemporary than this work.