In Oja Yumkhaibam Rajesh’s childhood, the rivers flowed perennially. The hills were thick with forests. Now this lush world has vanished.
Rajesh is an assistant professor, Department of Earth Sciences, Manipur University. His research interests—climate, especially land, rivers, ethnic conflict—are interacting, exacerbating the suffering of people.
Rajesh sees most of the problems stemming from deforestation, extensive pillage of forests in the hills of Manipur. That’s happening to facilitate poppy cultivation.
Another factor is the timber mafia. “They are old trees—200 years, 100 years, 50-year trees. They are cutting them for timber,” he says.
They have built roads to get the logs out; so, they clear small trees, dig up hills, lay roads and take away the timber. Each step of deforestation is a stand-alone calamity.
As a geologist interested in climate questions, Rajesh says the massive removal of trees has eroded the thick soil cover of the hills, exposing the bedrock. Sometimes, as much a one metre to two metres of soil has already gone.
That is because the trees that hold the soil in place are gone. The trees that create microclimates in the hills and valleys through their inhalations and exhalations are gone. The regime of rains that follows the breathing of trees is gone.
“Now, rains bring mud flows from the hills,” Rajesh tells . He says there is “a reverse siltation process going on”. The mud flows, silt, sand, soil, clay are going into the rivers, raising the river beds. A little rain, the rivers overflow, and they flood.
“So, flooding takes place because of deforestation, because of the erosion of hills, of the silt filling up the rivers,” Rajesh says.
The other thing is, when the bedrock is exposed it absorbs sunlight, radiating back, increasing the ambient temperatures, he says.
The worst problem arising out of felling trees is “we are losing water”. The hills are the source of this water for all the streams or all the rivers in the Manipur. “The catchment areas of almost all the rivers in Manipur start from the mountain,” he tells Hot Rock.
In the hills, they don’t have water storage like lakes and ponds, putting people in high water stress. The springs are in the foothills and they too are dry because there is no replenishment. He says a village where springs dried up had to be shifted to another place.
In his view, climate change, ethnic conflict and fight over resources all spring from the massive poppy cultivation in the state.
“The Golden Triangle, including parts of Myanmar, China, Laos, and Thailand, a hotbed of opium cultivation, has shifted to Manipur,” Rajesh says. The money from that also goes into fuelling ethnic conflict. “The youth are becoming drug addicts,” he says.
The Manipur of his childhood and his dreams has turned sour for Deben Bachaspatimayum, too. He taught peace and conflict resolution in postgraduate courses, and worked for both through his life. He has a master's degree on applied conflict transformation from Cambodia.
Deben too says in his childhood rivers flowed perennially. Especially the Imphal river. “For the 10-15 years, this river has been drying up. So, during my lifetime, this is the thing that has taken place. And this is what development has done to Manipur, whose life is tied to a perennial water system, river system in the valley.” The other rivers too are facing trouble.
During his childhood in the 1960s, hardly anyone had a ceiling fan in Manipur. The valley itself is 790 metres above sea levels, and it is cold, and gets colder in winter. He and his friends would put out buckets of water at night in their homes. By next morning, the water would freeze.
Now, a lot of houses have ceiling fans and air conditioning. Cars too have ACs. The water in buckets doesn’t freeze. Last year, the highest temperature was 38C in Imphal for a few days.
Deben is emphatic that the topography of Manipur determines life here. There is the valley at the centre ringed by hill ranges. The former is about 10 per cent of the land and the mountains comprise 90 per cent of the state. All the streams and rivers flow from the mountains into the valley.
Starting in the 1970s, development projects have made a mess of the natural ecology and environment. Loktak Lake—the largest freshwater lake in Manipur and in the northeast—is part of their life. Rivers from the mountains flow into it. From there, as Deben recounts it, the water slowly drains out, through a natural drainage system, and the entire water is discharged into the Chindwin river.
What the projects did was close the natural discharge route, diverting the water through a hill by digging a tunnel to work the turbines and generate electricity, then divert all the water in a different direction for irrigation. Actually, it’s two projects—one for electricity generation and another downstream project for reusing the same water for irrigation.
“How successful they have been is a big question because there’s a lot of problem on that,” Deben tells Hot Rock. According to him, the hill-valley ecosystem has been completely disrupted. And there are many other projects that are equally damaging.
As he sees it, the lake ecosystem has been disrupted and, again, heavy use of fertilisers and pesticides and jhum cultivation—all have laid waste to the lake.
“In Loktak, the entire natural profile has been changed. The aquatic life, the plants that the lake is home to, are dying. Then, there are invasive species that are adapting and thriving.”
Deben says the ethnic conflict is tied up with the issues of self-determination, climate change and warming, and the government’s policies. As he puts it, “The political solutions of the Nagas are going to impact the ecological system of Manipur and they are going to contribute to the global warming climate change.”
For example, a German-funded project wanted to weigh the outcomes of a long-running project in Manipur. What they found was wide disparities in approach and practice: Kukis and their villages haven’t maintained the forest. Springs have dried up as a result in their villages.
However, the Nagas saved trees and forests. Springs have been cared for and are flowing. This is what the German team observed. The German government was worried by the outbreak of violence from May 2023. Their funding was for building nurseries to regenerate forests and livelihoods. But they found that part of the money was going to Kukis buying guns and bullets.
On the other side, the Nagas have vibrant forests, with springs flowing. Deben says he requested the projects’ mentors to continue the funding because “otherwise, there will be no water and there will be water war.”
Although we don’t have a tidy explanation of the continuing horror in Manipur, the Indian state looks upon the Naga-Meitei struggle as “Naga insurgency” or “Meitei insurgency.” They are portrayed as working against the state, and the government claims Nagas want to separate from the Indian union. The state, army and a lot of Indians see the Nagas and Meitei as against India. This is essentially a security-state perception.
The Nagas live in the mountains, the Metei in the valleys. They have deities. Their claims on land and wanting to protect it for themselves and posterity come from their relationships and kinship with deities. Mountains are not just impersonal geography for them but participate in people’s lives—be it birth, death, funeral, marriage. The mountain is a presence subsuming all their presences. The Indian state is an outsider as are Kukis, who don’t have that cultural bond. Coming from Myanmar and other places, Kukis settled in the hills. Without the cultural connection, the Kuki and their villages exploited forests and water, rather than preserving them.
The greatest change now in the tribal community, whether legal or illegal, permanent, settled, or migrant people, “they have a heightened concept of the commercial value of land.” Deben is not hopeful of addressing climate change in the near future.
“For the government of India, the priority is counter-insurgency. They want to put an end to it by any means. So until the insurgency is over, in this part of the country, global warming issues will be on the back burner.
