ROADS to RUIN

Megaprojects in the Northeast cannot make up for decades of neglect

- GREESHMA KUTHAR AND KIMI COLNEY

THERE WERE NO WORDS left to be said, not even pleasantries. On 4 June, Sathaulien Sitlhou, the 45-year-old chief of Khaochangbung, a village in Manipur’s Kangpokpi district, stood in silence with other residents at the banks of the Imphal River. They were looking at the remains of the bridge they had tried to rebuild after it was destroyed in a flash flood during Cyclone Remal, on 28 May 2024. Now, just over a year later, another flood had washed away the progress they had made. “There will be no way our villages can see development,” Sathaulien eventually said, in evident frustration. “We need this bridge. Please do something.”

The fifty-metre prefabricated truss bridge, built using funds released by the union ministry of rural development under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, had been inaugurated with much fanfare in October 2021. For the first time in nearly a century of habitation, residents of the over two hundred villages in the Saikul subdivision had a road link to the district headquarters. Yamthong Haokip, who represented Saikul in the state assembly at the time, told journalists at the event that he was “extremely happy to witness and accomplish the long-cherished dream” of constructing the bridge “as, from now onward, developments and changes will start in the area.” At the inauguration, Sathaulien presented Yamthong a memorandum on behalf of the region’s village chiefs, asking for a 63-watt transformer and a retaining wall to protect the bridge. The chiefs expressed their gratitude, noting that they could now “walk on an iron bridge, after walking on a bamboo-made bridge for such long years with a heavy heart, particularly during monsoon season.”