Innovative development initiatives and good management practices have given a new image to the autonomous hill district of Assam. PHOTOGRAPHS: RITU RAJ KONWAR Ginger fields in Karbi Anglong. The district produces the best organic ginger in the world. For years, Karbi Anglong was in the news for all the wrong reasons. Ethnic clashes among Karbis, Kukis and Dimasas, and internecine clashes between insurgent outfits for three years from 2003 left over 200 people dead and nearly 2,000 injured and displaced 60,000. The largest district of Assam (10,434 sq km) also became infamous as a transit point for narcotics from the Golden Triangle and as an entry point of a thriving market for stolen vehicles in eastern India. The district has now acquired a new, positive image. The turnaround of the "poorest district of Assam' began towards the end of 2006 after M. Angamuthu took over as the Deputy Commissioner. In October 2006, barely a month after Angamuthu assumed office, the Assam Governor, Lt. Gen. (Retd.) Ajai Singh, visited the hill district. The Deputy Commissioner who was waiting at the Diphu railway station to receive him was taken by surprise when the Governor, soon after getting down from the train, asked him about ginger cultivation in the district. The young Indian Administrative Service officer soon realised that he has been entrusted with the responsibility of a district that produces the best organic ginger in the world. The average annual production of ginger in the district is 30,000 tonnes and it is grown by about 10,000 farmers. The ginger grown in Karbi Anglong has a low fibre content. Varieties such as Nadia and Aizol, which yield high quantities of dry rhizome and oleoresin oil, are in great demand among domestic buyers and exporters. The information was enough to give birth to a new initiative under the Rashtriya Sam Vikas Yojana (RSVY), a flagship programme of the United Progressive Alliance government. Thus was formed the Ginger Growers Cooperative Marketing Federation (GIN-FED) in Karbi Anglong in April 2007 with about 3,500 shareholders. The brainchild of Angamuthu, it had the support and guidance of P.C. Sarma, Chief Secretary, and P.P. Verma, then Principal Secretary, Planning and Development Department. Within a few months of its formation, GIN-FED was able to spice up the lives of ordinary ginger-growers and free them from the clutches of middlemen. At the first meeting of its shareholders at Diphu, GIN-FED issued to each of them a bar-coded G-Card