Contemporary Manipur As Data for Experimental Economics
From non-competency-based to mutually exclusive governance

Amar Yumnam *

Contemporary Manipur is a wonderfully interesting arena for the live examples of what should happen as the outcomes of the processes under way. It covers the sectors of community to the character of governance.

Let us start from the character and quality of governance. The government has been the only significant employer of people in the formal sector. This employment has not been for directly productive activities but in the expectation that their services should induce primarily productive activities among the people outside the employment under the government.

In other words, this is a situation where the government should lead the people and society by example. This entails three conditions to be satisfied. First, the people in the government should have been relatively more competent than those who had attempted to enter that service; it is different story for those who never thought of joining employment under the government sector.

Second, the society being in a very preliminary stage of development trajectory calls for these people, who had entered the government based on competence, to perform their governmental functions with dedication and fully conscientious of the social responsibilities. Third, the collective manifestation of the functioning of the people in the government should instil a spirit of collaboration and cooperation among the general populace.

Now let us examine if these conditions have been satisfied in the case of Manipur. The society of Manipur has experienced and knows pretty well that entrance into the employment under the government has not been based on competency. This has caused the divide we now see between governance and the governed. Effective governance requires the prevalence of a trust between the government and the governed. But in the case of Manipur this is simply non-existent. This has been coupled by a phenomenon of transfer of income and wealth from those who are outside the government sector to those who are employed in the government sector.

This is a very disturbing process in an economy where the growth process is both weak and non-widening. As this is the wider social scenario, those employed in the government sector see and exploit the period of employment in the government sector as the period for accumulation of personal wealth. The capability to exploit this condition is not equally distributed among those who are in the government sector. Those in the decision-making levels are the ones best-positioned to take advantage of this scope.

The transfer of wealth in favour of these groups of people have been socially most damaging both in terms of social lessons and encouragement of widely based productive activities. This being the character of the functioning in the office, there is no scope for instilling a spirit of dedication and cooperation among those in the lower rungs of the hierarchy in the governance.

This is why we observe no coordination and cooperation among the various branches of the government in their various manifestations of functioning even if there are communications and understanding at the decision-making levels; the percolation of the understanding at the decision-levels to the lower levels is not spontaneous and has always to be accompanied by identification of the persons and directly instructing them to follow suit.

The living example of the quality of governance is vividly visible in the current road-widening project from Keishampat to Malom. By the standard of Manipur, this is not a small project; it requires the cooperation of the general population and, above all, an absolutely coordinated functioning among the various wings of the government. In other words, this is not a project to be treated solely as the responsibility of the works department of the government.

This is a project which can show-case the character and capability of the government in a wonderfully positive way as it happens in a relatively crowded space. The telephone lines in this section have been killed since May of this year. If the wing of the government responsible for the revival of the telephone lines is responsive and rises to the occasion to restore the lines in the shortest possible time, it would at least have two spill-over effects.

First, it would make the people feel that the various wings of the government are working in tandem. Second, this feeling would generate a spirit of goodwill and collaboration among the people for the road-widening project. The case of the telephone applies to the power sector as well. While the road-widening project would be highly facilitated with a ready goodwill and collaboration from the general populace, the general public now curse the road-widening as responsible for both telephone and power failures.

This is where the character of governance comes out to the full. Any function performed by any wing of the government cannot and should never be treated as isolationist and exclusive domain of the wing in particular. The perfection of the road-widening project cannot be the sole function of the works department of the government. In fact, generating goodwill for the project depends on the functioning of the power, telecom and public health wings of the government and hardly on the works wing.

The visibility of collective commitment and cooperative effort among the wings of the government is sorely ! absent. Now from the government let us move to what is happening among the communities in Manipur. Very recently, a grade six student of the Mega Manipur School proved one core strength of the people in the valley. This boy took part in an all-India competition in Mathematics, and he participated in the competition meant for students of grade ninth and tenth. Lo, this boy stood first at the all-India level for the Silver category.

Remember, this boy is already at the Eight Rank at the global level in the Wushu sports of his age group. Such news of excellence in competency in one area of high competition is relatively more common among the valley population. Now the challenge and urgency is the imperative to generate competence based efficiency among the mountain population. With the Act East Policy increasingly getting unfolded, this is paramount.

Among the mountain population too, we now observe a deepening unequal distribution of wealth which is not based on the relative competence of individuals, as in the case of the valley. The greater danger among the mountains is that the scope for the poorer individuals to question the situation and rise is very limited; in fact, they largely have to allow themselves as political tools.

This naturally has the effect of accentuating the unequal distribution forever, the ultimate outcome of which can never be good. Well in fine, Manipur today is in a very precarious situation indeed.