Roads to Ruin

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.”

The bridge made a real difference in people’s lives. Most villages in Saikul barely had any facilities and depended on access to Kangpokpi. Vaijaikim, a nurse from one of the villages, told us that women usually gave birth at home, with the help of local midwives. If they needed to access a hospital in the district headquarters, pregnant women had to wade across the river and take one of the autorickshaws parked on the other side. Vaijaikim’s cousin had gone into labour a few months before the bridge was first completed. “As the delivery saw complications and my cousin bled, we had to use a Shaktiman”—a military truck brand—“to get her across the river,” she said. “We made it in the nick of time, or else it would have ended very badly.”

After Cyclone Remal destroyed the bridge, residents of Saikul decided to take matters into their own hands. As chief of the village closest to the river crossing, Sathaulien was one of the leaders of the group formed to lead the rebuilding efforts. They lobbied all the politicians and bureaucrats whom they could access. Seeing no interest, they turned to community fundraising, going door to door in an already backward region that had faced further deprivation due to the blockade of hill districts during the ethnic conflict that broke out in 2023. They slowly managed to piece together what was needed. When we met Sathaulien in April this year, he seemed anxious about the shortage of money, but the group was resolute about finishing the bridge before the onset of the monsoon. In the third week of May, he sent us photographs of the finished bridge and invited us to the inauguration, scheduled for the following week. But then, disaster struck.