Twenty-five Lok Sabha seats across eight states, four separate constitutional regimes for autonomy, and legislatures small enough that a few hundred votes decide a seat. The region is not a single market and has never been one.
The firm's stand on the region is on record: the North East is not India's periphery, and treating it as an annexe of a national strategy is both an analytical error and a political one.
Twenty-five Lok Sabha seats across the eight states — fourteen from Assam, and one or two each from Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura. Several of these Assemblies are forty or sixty seats, so a constituency can turn on a margin that would be a rounding error in Uttar Pradesh. The consequence for strategy is unusual: the unit of work is the village, not the media market.
The firm has won mandates in Assam, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh, and is engaged in Nagaland. Three states delivered, a fourth in hand — in a region where most national firms arrive for a cycle and leave with the counting.
What that work leaves behind is a repository rather than a case study: booth-level results and swings, constituency histories through two delimitations, community and language maps, candidate and defection records, council-cycle calendars, and standing field relationships across the eight states. It is maintained continuously, not assembled for a pitch. The practical effect is that a mandate here does not open with a month of orientation — the reading is already done, and the first week is spent on the argument.
Terrain knowledge in the North East is not a claim about coverage. It is knowing which authority actually delivers in a given block, which language a household argues in, which council election runs on its own cycle, and which convening body — a village council, a students' union, a church — has to be in the room before anything is announced. None of that is in a national dataset.
No other part of India carries this many parallel arrangements at once. The Sixth Schedule governs autonomous district councils in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram. Article 371A protects Naga customary law and land, and Article 371G does the equivalent for Mizoram. The Inner Line Permit still regulates entry into several states. And traditional authorities — village councils, chiefs, church bodies — hold real convening power that no statute lists.
Any delivery diagnosis in the region has to establish which of these owns the last mile before it says anything about a scheme. This is the ordinary reason a national programme reports high coverage while a household reports none: the scheme was measured to the state's boundary and delivered through an authority the state does not run.
These states raise a small share of what they spend and depend on Union transfers and Finance Commission devolution to a degree unmatched elsewhere. That dependence sets what a state government can honestly promise, and it makes the untied share of a state's budget — not its headline outlay — the number a strategist and an adviser both have to know.