Manipur needs a livelihood policy, not just relief
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Shweta V
Three years of security deployment and relief allocation have sustained life in Manipur. Neither can rebuild it. The State needs a livelihood framework— and a civic architecture to end the bandh reflex on both sides of the divide.
Manipur was in structural crisis before the conflict began in May 2023; the violence marks the point of detonation of a pre-existing vulnerability. The eco- nomic data from the preceding decade are stark. Real GSDP grew at 4.9 per cent between 2012-13 and 2021-22, below the National average of 5.6 per cent. Per capita income stood 41 per cent lower than the National average.
Unemployment was 4.7 per cent against a National rate of 3.2 per cent. And metrics such as GST collections capture only the formal sector; Manipur's vast informal economy — its artisans, traders and micro industries — remains in the shadows, almost certainly collapsing further with every round of violence. Three years on, some share of that economic capacity has been permanently lost. That there exists no systematic measure of this loss is itself a manifestation of policy failure.
The prevailing Government response remains anchored in two policy instruments: security deploy- ment and relief allocation. Both are indispensable— no rebuilding can begin without safety and subsistence — but neither is independently sufficient. Law and order is essential to survive; it will not rebuild life. There is a fundamental mismatch between the methods employed and the existing structural problems.
The relief camp is not a destination
The relief camp is not an end in itself—it is a temporary pause. That pause has now lasted three years. As of March 2026, 58,881 people stand displaced, with 174 relief camps still operational, 7,894 houses per- manently destroyed and 2,646 partially damaged. The Union Home Ministry has cleared Rs 424 crore for maintaining these camps and Rs 523 crore for the rehabilitation of internally displaced persons (IDPs), and the State has earmarked a further Rs 734 crore for resettlement in 2026-27. That is not a small commitment. But fiscal allocation is not the same as a transition to livelihood, and the persistence of displacement at this scale, this far into the crisis, is itself evidence that relief has reached the limit of what it can do.
Relief sustains life in a camp. It does not restore life beyond one.
Constructive interventions have been attempted — rehabilitation, relocation, skill development coupled with State procurement, and counselling for the affected. But they operate in silos, and vary with each district and its administrative will. The State's own framing— the 'One Family One Livelihood' initiative — concedes what the right unit of measurement is : the household. The functional shift that framing implies, from relief to livelihood-building, not just in camps but across the whole State, down to each household, has not yet been made.
The State has initiated steps in this direction. The Chief Minister's Entrepreneurship Support Scheme (CMESS)—Special Package for IDPs, extended in 2024 to link established businesses with displaced persons in relief camps, offers collateral-free loans of up to Rs 10 lakh with a 30 per cent State subsidy and minimum-wage guarantees for IDP employees. District-level awareness drives have followed, and about 111 IDPs had received one-time assistance under the scheme as of March 2026. It is a start. But it operates as an isolated instrument rather than as part of a coordinated livelihood framework, and its reach across districts remains uneven. Three years in, the State can look beyond survival: enterprises supported through such 'camp-to-enterprise' schemes can be graduated into nano and micro enterprises with forward and backward market linkages and working capital—if a coordinating framework exists to do so.
The bandh as symptom, not cause
On the other side of this policy gap sits a pattern the State has equally failed to address structurally.
The instinct to call bandhs and blockades has hardened into a bandh culture across Manipur—and what is most analytically significant is that this culture is not confined to one side of the conflict. It runs symmetrically across both.
On the Meitei side, Meira Paibi — the women's movement that has shaped Meitei civil society since 1977 — has used the road blockade as its primary mode of public action. COCOMI, the umbrella body of Meitei civil society organisations, has coordinated shutdowns across the valley districts, including a bandh on the second anniversary of the conflict in May 2025 that halted businesses, schools and transport across Imphal and surrounding areas.
On the Kuki-Zo side, the institutional architecture of dissent is equally developed — and equally reliant on the shutdown as its primary instrument. The Indigenous Tribal Leaders' Forum (ITLF), which emerged as the main representative body of the Kuki-Zo tribes during the conflict, and the Kuki-Zo Council, formed in October 2024 to consolidate tribal representation, have both coordinated highway blockades and district shutdowns. The Committee on Tribal Unity (CoTU) enforced an indefinite bandh on NH-2 and NH-37 — the arteries connecting the hill districts to the rest of the State — in protest against what it described as partisan security operations.
The Kuki Students' Organisation (KSO) and the Zomi Students' Federation (ZSF) similarly called shutdowns in the hill districts on the conflict's second anniversary. And a total shutdown is observed on the third of every month — 'Separation Day' — with businesses, educational institutions and vehicular movement halted across Kangpokpi district, a practice that continues to this day.
The recent instance of the women vendors of Thoubal Keithel declaring a total district-wide shutdown in June 2026 — to protest the licensing of a retail chain outlet — is instructive of how deep this pattern runs: not merely a political tool in conflict, but a reflex even in a peacetime commercial dispute.
Such actions by non-governmental stakeholders functioning as parallel Governments, without demo- cratic legitimacy, pose a serious question: what does development mean to the people of Manipur ? The State has a responsibility to protect its people; equally, citizens have a responsibility to engage the democratic processes of the State rather than suspend them. The street protest is the escalating manifestation of a civic institutional vacuum that neither side of the conflict created alone.
The economic cost of this pattern has never been measured — a gap that is itself revealing. What the data does show is the broader cost of conflict and shutdown compounding together. GST collections in Manipur contracted 19 per cent in the April–October 2023 period, at a time when National collections were rising in double digits. An industry official quoted in Business Standard described even this as 'only the tip of the iceberg', given the scale of the informal economy that falls outside GST data entirely.12 Tourism, a sector the state had begun to build seriously — 1.6 lakh visitors in FY23, a G20 event, a Miss India pageant — collapsed to under 20,000 visitors by November 2023. At Ima Keithel, a fruit vendor described her daily sales falling from Rs 30,000– 40,000 to barely Rs 4,000, selling at a loss on perishable stock she could not hold through repeated curfews.These are the costs that the bandh compounds — not creates, but compounds — on an economy already under severe strain. That no agency has ever calculated them is a policy choice, not a constraint.
The institutional vacuum underneath
The dominance of the bandh as an instrument of dissent — on both sides — is, in large part, the consequence of absent functional alternatives. Academic research on inter-ethnic conflict and civil society organisations in Manipur has examined how bodies such as Kuki Inpi Manipur (KIM), COCOMI and Meira Paibi have each established parallel governance structures, exercising authority not through formal mandate but through direct action and sustained mobilisation.
This dynamic is not unique to either community — it is the shared institutional condition of both.
Parallel governance by non-governmental bodies is not something the state can suppress its way out of; it must be engaged structurally.
With multiple citizen grievance redressal mechanisms available in India, it is the State's responsibility to create awareness of them. But it is equally the responsibility of these civil society organisations — which hold real authority over whether a market opens or a road stays shut — to explore functional mechanisms of grievance redressal beyond the street. The accountability of each non- govern- mental civil society body to its own people's development is not optional.
What is needed is a community space where issues can be legitimately negotiated before they escalate to shutdown. Co-constituted bodies at the district level — bringing together district authorities and area-level local bodies, with structured representation for Meira Paibi and COCOMI's constituents on the Meitei side and ITLF, KIM and CoTU on the Kuki-Zo side, alongside civil society organi- sations from both communities—can provide exactly that interface.
Such a body cannot offer a veto on state decisions. But it can remove information asymmetry, provide a procedural channel for grievance ahead of escalation, and—critically— quantify the economic cost of bandhs, blockades and school closures, making collective self-harm visible as a number rather than an abstraction. That visibility is a more sustainable deterrent than any enforcement mechanism. The possibility of gazetting such bodies should be explored; Nagaland's communitisation of public institutions, enacted into law in 2002, offers a working precedent — one that two decades on still requires stronger oversight and accountability mechanisms, per the State's own review — for giving community bodies formal, accountable roles in public services.
Convergence is the key
Manipur's existing policy architecture is not without assets. Ima Keithel — the world's largest women-run market, with some 5,000 vendors in Imphal — remains economically under- leveraged; integrating it with credit networks and schemes such as ODOP and GeM would cost the State little beyond administrative will, and carry real symbolic weight for the local community.
Skill development missions, MSME funding lines, self-help group schemes and market-linked programmes already exist, and align with livelihood restoration. What is missing is convergence: a coordinating mechanism that aligns these instruments toward a single objective, with feedback loops that catch district-level failure before it compounds — and a mandate for the State's own statistical machinery to measure, quarter by quarter, what conflict and shutdown cost.
Three years after the conflict began, the State has demonstrated that it can sustain relief at scale.
The next demonstration it owes its people — to all of them— is that it can build the institutional architecture, civic, economic and procedural, through which Manipur moves, finally, from surviving to rebuilding.
Three years of security deployment and relief allocation have sustained life in Manipur. Neither can rebuild it. The State needs a livelihood framework— and a civic architecture to end the bandh reflex on both sides of the divide.
Manipur was in structural crisis before the conflict began in May 2023; the violence marks the point of detonation of a pre-existing vulnerability. The eco- nomic data from the preceding decade are stark. Real GSDP grew at 4.9 per cent between 2012-13 and 2021-22, below the National average of 5.6 per cent. Per capita income stood 41 per cent lower than the National average.
Unemployment was 4.7 per cent against a National rate of 3.2 per cent. And metrics such as GST collections capture only the formal sector; Manipur's vast informal economy — its artisans, traders and micro industries — remains in the shadows, almost certainly collapsing further with every round of violence. Three years on, some share of that economic capacity has been permanently lost. That there exists no systematic measure of this loss is itself a manifestation of policy failure.
The prevailing Government response remains anchored in two policy instruments: security deploy- ment and relief allocation. Both are indispensable— no rebuilding can begin without safety and subsistence — but neither is independently sufficient. Law and order is essential to survive; it will not rebuild life. There is a fundamental mismatch between the methods employed and the existing structural problems.
The relief camp is not a destination
The relief camp is not an end in itself—it is a temporary pause. That pause has now lasted three years. As of March 2026, 58,881 people stand displaced, with 174 relief camps still operational, 7,894 houses per- manently destroyed and 2,646 partially damaged. The Union Home Ministry has cleared Rs 424 crore for maintaining these camps and Rs 523 crore for the rehabilitation of internally displaced persons (IDPs), and the State has earmarked a further Rs 734 crore for resettlement in 2026-27. That is not a small commitment. But fiscal allocation is not the same as a transition to livelihood, and the persistence of displacement at this scale, this far into the crisis, is itself evidence that relief has reached the limit of what it can do.
Relief sustains life in a camp. It does not restore life beyond one.
Constructive interventions have been attempted — rehabilitation, relocation, skill development coupled with State procurement, and counselling for the affected. But they operate in silos, and vary with each district and its administrative will. The State's own framing— the 'One Family One Livelihood' initiative — concedes what the right unit of measurement is : the household. The functional shift that framing implies, from relief to livelihood-building, not just in camps but across the whole State, down to each household, has not yet been made.
The State has initiated steps in this direction. The Chief Minister's Entrepreneurship Support Scheme (CMESS)—Special Package for IDPs, extended in 2024 to link established businesses with displaced persons in relief camps, offers collateral-free loans of up to Rs 10 lakh with a 30 per cent State subsidy and minimum-wage guarantees for IDP employees. District-level awareness drives have followed, and about 111 IDPs had received one-time assistance under the scheme as of March 2026. It is a start. But it operates as an isolated instrument rather than as part of a coordinated livelihood framework, and its reach across districts remains uneven. Three years in, the State can look beyond survival: enterprises supported through such 'camp-to-enterprise' schemes can be graduated into nano and micro enterprises with forward and backward market linkages and working capital—if a coordinating framework exists to do so.
The bandh as symptom, not cause
On the other side of this policy gap sits a pattern the State has equally failed to address structurally.
The instinct to call bandhs and blockades has hardened into a bandh culture across Manipur—and what is most analytically significant is that this culture is not confined to one side of the conflict. It runs symmetrically across both.
On the Meitei side, Meira Paibi — the women's movement that has shaped Meitei civil society since 1977 — has used the road blockade as its primary mode of public action. COCOMI, the umbrella body of Meitei civil society organisations, has coordinated shutdowns across the valley districts, including a bandh on the second anniversary of the conflict in May 2025 that halted businesses, schools and transport across Imphal and surrounding areas.
On the Kuki-Zo side, the institutional architecture of dissent is equally developed — and equally reliant on the shutdown as its primary instrument. The Indigenous Tribal Leaders' Forum (ITLF), which emerged as the main representative body of the Kuki-Zo tribes during the conflict, and the Kuki-Zo Council, formed in October 2024 to consolidate tribal representation, have both coordinated highway blockades and district shutdowns. The Committee on Tribal Unity (CoTU) enforced an indefinite bandh on NH-2 and NH-37 — the arteries connecting the hill districts to the rest of the State — in protest against what it described as partisan security operations.
The Kuki Students' Organisation (KSO) and the Zomi Students' Federation (ZSF) similarly called shutdowns in the hill districts on the conflict's second anniversary. And a total shutdown is observed on the third of every month — 'Separation Day' — with businesses, educational institutions and vehicular movement halted across Kangpokpi district, a practice that continues to this day.
The recent instance of the women vendors of Thoubal Keithel declaring a total district-wide shutdown in June 2026 — to protest the licensing of a retail chain outlet — is instructive of how deep this pattern runs: not merely a political tool in conflict, but a reflex even in a peacetime commercial dispute.
Such actions by non-governmental stakeholders functioning as parallel Governments, without demo- cratic legitimacy, pose a serious question: what does development mean to the people of Manipur ? The State has a responsibility to protect its people; equally, citizens have a responsibility to engage the democratic processes of the State rather than suspend them. The street protest is the escalating manifestation of a civic institutional vacuum that neither side of the conflict created alone.
The economic cost of this pattern has never been measured — a gap that is itself revealing. What the data does show is the broader cost of conflict and shutdown compounding together. GST collections in Manipur contracted 19 per cent in the April–October 2023 period, at a time when National collections were rising in double digits. An industry official quoted in Business Standard described even this as 'only the tip of the iceberg', given the scale of the informal economy that falls outside GST data entirely.12 Tourism, a sector the state had begun to build seriously — 1.6 lakh visitors in FY23, a G20 event, a Miss India pageant — collapsed to under 20,000 visitors by November 2023. At Ima Keithel, a fruit vendor described her daily sales falling from Rs 30,000– 40,000 to barely Rs 4,000, selling at a loss on perishable stock she could not hold through repeated curfews.These are the costs that the bandh compounds — not creates, but compounds — on an economy already under severe strain. That no agency has ever calculated them is a policy choice, not a constraint.
The institutional vacuum underneath
The dominance of the bandh as an instrument of dissent — on both sides — is, in large part, the consequence of absent functional alternatives. Academic research on inter-ethnic conflict and civil society organisations in Manipur has examined how bodies such as Kuki Inpi Manipur (KIM), COCOMI and Meira Paibi have each established parallel governance structures, exercising authority not through formal mandate but through direct action and sustained mobilisation.
This dynamic is not unique to either community — it is the shared institutional condition of both.
Parallel governance by non-governmental bodies is not something the state can suppress its way out of; it must be engaged structurally.
With multiple citizen grievance redressal mechanisms available in India, it is the State's responsibility to create awareness of them. But it is equally the responsibility of these civil society organisations — which hold real authority over whether a market opens or a road stays shut — to explore functional mechanisms of grievance redressal beyond the street. The accountability of each non- govern- mental civil society body to its own people's development is not optional.
What is needed is a community space where issues can be legitimately negotiated before they escalate to shutdown. Co-constituted bodies at the district level — bringing together district authorities and area-level local bodies, with structured representation for Meira Paibi and COCOMI's constituents on the Meitei side and ITLF, KIM and CoTU on the Kuki-Zo side, alongside civil society organi- sations from both communities—can provide exactly that interface.
Such a body cannot offer a veto on state decisions. But it can remove information asymmetry, provide a procedural channel for grievance ahead of escalation, and—critically— quantify the economic cost of bandhs, blockades and school closures, making collective self-harm visible as a number rather than an abstraction. That visibility is a more sustainable deterrent than any enforcement mechanism. The possibility of gazetting such bodies should be explored; Nagaland's communitisation of public institutions, enacted into law in 2002, offers a working precedent — one that two decades on still requires stronger oversight and accountability mechanisms, per the State's own review — for giving community bodies formal, accountable roles in public services.
Convergence is the key
Manipur's existing policy architecture is not without assets. Ima Keithel — the world's largest women-run market, with some 5,000 vendors in Imphal — remains economically under- leveraged; integrating it with credit networks and schemes such as ODOP and GeM would cost the State little beyond administrative will, and carry real symbolic weight for the local community.
Skill development missions, MSME funding lines, self-help group schemes and market-linked programmes already exist, and align with livelihood restoration. What is missing is convergence: a coordinating mechanism that aligns these instruments toward a single objective, with feedback loops that catch district-level failure before it compounds — and a mandate for the State's own statistical machinery to measure, quarter by quarter, what conflict and shutdown cost.
Three years after the conflict began, the State has demonstrated that it can sustain relief at scale.
The next demonstration it owes its people — to all of them— is that it can build the institutional architecture, civic, economic and procedural, through which Manipur moves, finally, from surviving to rebuilding.