The notion of a ‘Model Village’ encourages sustainable growth and self-sufficiency in rural villages with all aspects of infrastructure development. To construct one such model village, the extractive industry adopted the ‘Karbongpara village’ of Tripura, as a project of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) which commenced in 2018. This village is home to the Karbong community which consists of roughly 31 families. The central objective of this CSR project was not only to transform a rural village into a model village but most importantly to assist prevent the Karbong community from extinction by promoting village infrastructure development. Because, the Karbong community, a sub-tribe of the Halam community in Tripura, are on the verge of extinction with lesser than 300 population. Therefore, the extractive industry committed to the foundation of a model village to secure their alternative livelihood pursuit with the notion of a model village that will also aid in revitalizing this numerically smaller tribal community in Tripura. However, although this CSR project was successfully implemented with some components of village infrastructure, the project’s outcome appears to not contribute to sustainable development, which further contributed to the failure to revive the karbongs’ the community from vanishing. Against this backdrop, the paper aspires to unravel, assess and analyze the approaches and methods of the extractive industries’ CSR project on the foundation of model village and its effects on the Karbong Community in Tripura, Northeast India. The paper argues that merely emphasizing the aspects of village infrastructure and livelihood programming while maintaining a paradigmatic blind spot on the socio-cultural aspects would fail to revive the Karbong community. The paper posited that CSR projects have a great potential to incorporate cultural aspects which will aid in the revival of the Karbong community.
