Infrastructure of Injustice

State and Politics in Manipur and Northeast India

Raile Rocky Ziipao

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000067972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the dynamics of infrastructure development in Northeast India, especially Manipur, from a socio-anthropological perspective. It looks at the pattern and distribution of infrastructure in the region to analyse the impact of education, roads and health care on the livelihoods, ecosystems, governance and social futures of communities.

The volume examines the infrastructure deficit in the conflict-ridden state of Manipur, focusing especially on electricity and roads. The author shows how problems arising from poor infrastructure are further complicated on account of corruption, insurgency, ethnic unrest and the politics of marginalisation. Looking at the discourse around development in the northeast, the volume also highlights the structural inequality in Manipur and other states. It further shows how infrastructure development can become a means for enabling trade, creating markets, diluting boundaries between varied ethnic groups and connecting people.

This book will be useful for researchers and scholars of development studies, economics, social anthropology, sociology and public policy – particularly those interested in India's northeast.

1
THE PLACE OF INFRASTRUCTURE IN DEVELOPMENT

Introduction

For over 30 years, the state government has neglected the Tamenglong-Haflong Road. The construction of this road was included in the sixth five-year plan. During 1980–93, the PWD executed some initial work. However, the road remained impassable due to faulty alignment and non-completion. In 1997, the state entrusted the Border Road Organisation (BRO) with the construction of this road, but it declined, citing faulty alignment. Even after repeated assurances from the central government, including the former union tribal affairs minister Shri P. R. Kyndiah (2006) and Home Minister Shri P. Chidambaram (2011) during their visits to the district, the government did not build the road, and the people’s dream of better facilities remained unfulfilled. The acts of non-implementation and delaying the project are themselves politics amounting to denial of justice to tribal societies. The temporalities and suspension nature of basic infrastructural projects is a common phenomenon across pan-tribal belt/territories in India. The GoI initiated a flagship programme known as Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) in 2000 to provide rural connectivity to all villages in the country with all-weather roads. Yet more than 17 years after the implementation of the programme, many tribal villages remain outside the radar of connectivity.

Inadequate basic infrastructure limits the movement of goods, people and ideas, especially in the hill areas predominantly inhabited by tribes. Even basic needs, such as all-weather roads connecting all villages, minimum electricity supply, health-care centres, primary schools and potable water, remain inaccessible for most tribal communities in the State of Manipur. This demonstrates how over India’s seven decades of independence, the state has been negligent when it comes to addressing the problems of tribal people. Tribes are the ones that suffer the ramifications of the Indian state’s indifferent attitude. Consequences of inadequate infrastructure include villagers carrying their sick in bamboo stretchers to the nearest health centre. Oranges and Naga chillies (commonly known as ghost peppers in international markets) grow abundantly in Tamenglong, a hill district in Manipur. However, surplus agricultural products are left to rot, as villagers are unable to transport them to the market due to a lack of road access.

A native-born, young and dynamic Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, Armstrong Pame, took up road connectivity as an immediate requirement in the area after witnessing the hardships faced by people in remote villages in and around the supposed route of the road. While posted as subdivisional officer (SDO) of Tousem subdivision, he and his elder brother mobilised resources and local communities. They created a Facebook page seeking donations to construct a 100-km rural road. Previously disconnected from social media, this rural village resorted to Facebook in order to establish infrastructure. A dedicated local resident, Haingiabuing Pame, mobilised the village with the following statement: ‘I shall give all that I have to see the completion of this road. We have waited for too long. This has been my dream. Let us celebrate when it is finished’. The response from across the globe was overwhelming. The local communities took ownership of the road and contributed in a variety of ways, including labour, materials, bulldozers, fuel, food, accommodation and more. The People’s Road, which connects the states of Manipur, Nagaland and Assam in India, was completed in seven months (August 2012–February 2013), after the state government neglected to complete it for over 30 years. Inaugurated on 17 February 2013 and opened for public use, the motto of this road stands as ‘together we began, together we built and together we finished’. The monolith commemorating the inauguration of the road reads as follows:

THE PEOPLE’S ROAD

Dedicated unto the glory of God

With the celebration of the people’s endeavour

by ARMSTRONG PAME, IAS

SDO, Tousem

In the August presence of all

the donors, volunteers and well-wishers

May the present and the future generations

Remember every single drop of sweat, tears, and contribution

Rendered for the construction of this road from all over the world

Date: 17 February 2013

KATANGNAM VILLAGE

Despite considerable odds, the tribal people from India’s most remote district resisted marginalisation and surmounted structural obstacles by constructing 100 km of road. By doing so, they succeeded in carving their own path to mobility where the state failed miserably. The condition of the tribes’ infrastructure development in Manipur stands as a testimony of the state’s failure to discharge its duties and responsibilities. Rather than addressing the historical injustice and political aspirations of the tribes, the state suppressed and denied agency, thereby forcing the tribes to look after themselves. The Tamenglong’s construction and maintenance of roads for livelihood, economic sustenance and maintenance of the ecological balance between people and nature have become the model in other parts of the state. If the state or development practitioners need a consultant on building roads, they should ask the true trailblazers – the tribal people. This is the extent to which rural habitats need connectivity and other basic infrastructure.

In landlocked states, the role of physical connectivity in overall development of a country or region assumes a place of critical importance. This is much more so in regions such as Northeast India and its states, as they are not only landlocked but also marked by hills and difficult terrain. Manipur is no exception. With this being the case, connectivity turns out to be critical given the landlocked nature and difficult geographical terrain. The overarching impact of infrastructure on the existing social relationship between a community and its environment, and on the socio-politico-economic development, are crucial in states like Manipur and Northeast India.

In the sensitive social and political context of India’s border and frontier regions, infrastructure resonates with a unique material agency, fostering a close correlation with ethnicity. The current debates on infrastructure development by social scientists focus on budgetary allocations, inter- and intra-regional variations and deficits in infrastructural development. There is hardly any serious engagement with infrastructural development in a specific political context, which takes into account social composition and people at the micro-level. Northeast India is often projected as an infrastructural deficit and backwards region. However, this can be contested from the empirical evidence stemming from different states and geographical locations of varied ethnic communities. Mishra and Upadhyay (2017) noted,

There is no doubt that significant gaps remain in the availability of physical, financial and social infrastructure across the region. However, it is wrong to reduce the development challenges of the region to the infrastructure deficit not only are there significant differences across the plain and hilly areas, but even within these regions, the challenges of development are multi-level, diverse and complex. Given this diversity and complexity, problems of the region cannot be neatly aggregated to fixed notions of ‘backwardness’.

(:9)

In fact, within the region, minorities have experienced infrastructural injustice since colonial times. The very act of not building and investing in infrastructure in the hill areas amounts to injustice. This is much more so in a chronic conflict-ridden state like Manipur where infrastructure in the valley is better developed as compared to those of the hill areas. The hilly areas where tribes predominantly reside could very well fit into the criterion of infrastructural deficit area. However, districts such as Imphal East, Imphal West, Kamrup Metro, Kamrup Rural, East Khasi Hills and Nagaon, Kokrajhar, amongst others, are on par with other developed districts in India in terms of infrastructure index. There is a spatial and social concentration of infrastructure within particular ethnic or economic groups – an aspect that is rarely presented through aggregate secondary data (ibid.). There is a need to critically examine the social dynamics of infrastructure development with the changing contours of development policies and programmes. This would pave the way for theorising structural inequality, which has been inadequately addressed in Manipur and Northeast India. Development policies and programmes of the GoI are crucial factors leading to infrastructure disparities within the region and states. Hence, it merits a revisit of infrastructure policy in India vis-à-vis its approach to northeastern states in the post-independent era. It is imperative to unearth what constitutes infrastructure in India.

Contextualising infrastructure in India

The term infrastructure gained currency with the emergence of development economics in the early 1950s, which is used interchangeably with social overhead capital (SOC). Amongst the early development economists, Lewis (1955) stressed the importance of public utilities, ports, water supplies and electricity, and Higgins (1959) focused on transport, public utilities, schools and hospitals in promoting economic development. The services referred by Levis and Higgins are today thought of as infrastructure. However, it was Hirschman (1958) who gave a very wide meaning to SOC or infrastructure. In his formulation, SOC includes education, public health, law and order, transportation, communication, power, water supply, irrigation and drainage. Infrastructure has thus meant different things to different people at different points in time and place depending on the changes in the technology, lifestyles of the people and the socio-economic and political environment under consideration (MoS&PI, 2010).

The Central Statistics Office (CSO), in its Manual: Infrastructure Statistics, operationalised infrastructure based on the Rangarajan Commission Report (2001). According to the Rangarajan Commission, infrastructure does not refer to the user and user-specific structure but to long-lasting engineering structures. They identified six characteristic features of infrastructure: (1) natural monopoly, (2) non-tradability of outputs, (3) bestowing externalities on society, (4) high-suck costs or asset specificity, (5) non-rivalness (up to congestion limits) in consumption and (6) possibility of price exclusion. The commission was of the view that the following infrastructures have all six characteristics identified in defining infrastructure:

• Railway tracks, signalling system, stations
• Road, bridges
• Transmission and distribution of electricity
• Telephone lines, telecommunications network
• Pipelines for water, crude oil, slurry, etc.
• Waterways, port facilities
• Canal networks for irrigation
• Sanitation or sewerage

(Rangarajan Commission, 2001)

It is interesting to note how economists and socio-anthropologists see infrastructure. The former perceive infrastructure from the material and value perspective, whereas the latter see infrastructure as a relational concept.¹ Star and Rudleder (1996) posited that infrastructure is fundamentally a relational concept. For them, infrastructure has the following dimensions/properties:

(1) embeddedness: it is sunk into other structures; (2) transparency: it does not have to be reinvented each time; (3) reach or scope: it is not a one-off event or one-site practice; (4) being learned as part of membership: it is associated with a community of practice; (5) being linked with conventions of practice: it both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice; (6) becomes visible upon breakdown.

(:113)

Nevertheless, economists and urban planners distinguished two types of infrastructure: economic and social infrastructure. Economic infrastructure is defined as those infrastructures that promote economic activities, such as roads, railroads, airports, seaports, electricity, telecommunication, water supply and sanitation. Social infrastructures are those that promote the health, education and cultural standards of the people. They include schools, libraries, universities, clinic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: infrastructure of injustice
• 1 The place of infrastructure in development
• 2 Political economy of development in Manipur
• 3 State of contestation and negotiation
• 4 Political highway and its tributaries
• 5 Electricity: regularly irregular
• 6 Social and political processes of infrastructure development
• 7 Conclusion: beyond unholy trinity
• Index