Manipur's Impasse
- Resource people relationships -

Amar Yumnam *

That Manipur is now in an absolutely chaotic situation is known and felt by all. But what needs is the search for a route to escape from this bedlam. Escaping the bedlam is, however, not going to be an easy one for the reasons and circumstances leading to the contemporary quagmire are yet to be fully appreciated. In fact, application of scientific mind towards understanding of the issues is of relatively recent origin.

Many Causes : While there could be many causes for the present social strife, inter and intra ethnic tensions, and the near collapse of growth process (despite the claims to the contrary of powers that be a la statistics is a lie), I would today like to spell out a possible geographic cause of this depressing scenario.

The importance of geographic factors—which include agriculture conditions, disease environment, climatic conditions, etc is now being appreciated increasingly among economists working on developmental issues. In fact, it is now accepted as one of the, if not the most, important deep determinants of development.

Coming to Manipur and looking back to the historical past, we can think of two geographic factors as significant factors determining depth, direction and spread of economic growth and technological change in the State. The fertility, in the relative sense, of the valley for agricultural purposes has been noted with particular significance, even folkloric.

The ability of this fertility to support the population without much difficulty, and that too with a single crop in a year definitely must have released the labour force either for enjoyment of leisure or for involvement in work for technological innovation.

The prevalence of villagewide festivities spread across the year speaks of the availability of time to the people without the need to worry for food and other needs of the family. The families must have been secured of food round the year with the products made available from the fertile land.

Secondly, the assurance in the food front without much effort, again in the relative sense, must have released a portion of the labour force to indulge in technological innovations or even in wars, which were more frequent than not. Well, war for that matter is a big pusher for technological change. This could have been the cause for the long term dominance of the valley over surrounding areas in technology matters.

Now what about the mountains? The mountains of Manipur have been storehouses of forest products like woods, and foods (including animals). This abundance could easily support a small population without compromising on the carrying capacity of the forests.

But the population being much smaller in the mountain pockets as compared to the valley, there was not much pressure on the mountains to innovate or rather not much labour force could be released for involvement in technological innovation. Even if they were there, it could not reach a threshold level.

But Now : But now the situation is completely altered. The very geography which was the foundation of the civilisation and sustenance of it has been made to undergo drastic changes. In other words, the very character of the relationship between geography and people of the land has been altered and is now put under huge pressure.

In the mountains, the storehouse is no longer so, and extracting any from the remaining store is possible only at prohibitive socio-environmental costs. The population has expanded but the carrying capacity has as well been eroded. This has definitely put a burden on the population for which they were not prepared, and for which they did not have any prior exposure. This is because the period of deterioration has been compressed into a very short historical period of less than half a century.

Similar has been the case in the valley of the land too. The dramatic upsurge in the number of people in the valley has been so quick and mammothic as to affect the productivity from different angles. First, the very size of land available for the age old agricultural activities declined. Secondly, the labour force became larger than required by the capacity of the land to absorb while the traditional areas for involvement in technological innovation became increasingly irrelevant in the changing milieu.

The Tragedy : The tragedy of both the mountains and the valley has been that these transformations took place rather with exogenous forces without being accompanied by exogenously induced technological innovations. This left the endogenous capacity to innovate dumbfounded.

In other words, the economy did not evolve into a modernised one with thriving growth prospects while the traditional strengths were fast getting grounded. Well these are congenial environments for corruption to flourish, and politicking to take roots. After all, they say politics is the last refuge of the scoundrels.