Multidisciplinary Research Approaches to Rural and Tribal Economic Development: A Methodological Framework in Alignment with NEP 2020

Abstract The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 advocates a paradigm shift in Indian higher education by dismantling artificial disciplinary silos and placing community-engaged, multidisciplinary research at the centre of undergraduate and postgraduate curricula. In developing economies like India, rural and tribal regions face multidimensional socio-economic challenges, ranging from agrarian distress and shifting labour patterns to informal debt traps and natural resource degradation. Conventional economic analysis, which relies heavily on standard neoclassical equilibrium models and top-down macro indicators, often fails to capture these nuanced institutional and ecological realities. This paper develops an applied, multidisciplinary research methodology framework tailored for regional and tribal economic investigations under the mandate of NEP 2020. Using authentic secondary data from the Census of India, the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), and the Reserve Bank of India’s credit deployment metrics, this study demonstrates how economics can be integrated with environmental accounting, rural sociology, spatial geography, and computational data analytics. The paper outlines the structural challenges facing non-urban colleges, particularly infrastructure shortages and deficits in faculty development. It sets out a concrete semester-by-semester field research protocol for higher education institutions.