Aheli Moitra
A village little towards the east of Nagaland State sits neatly on the side of a hill overlooking its terrace paddy fields. Monoliths are a usual feature of its public spaces; alongside these a different sort of monolith appears, painted white with the face of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on it. Below the image, the letters read ‘Constructed under MGNREGA’.
The board refers to the road that wiggles through the length of the village, constructed through funds from the Indian central scheme called Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. From the 120 households in the village, most people are ‘job card’ holders and the village sustains its economic needs through such central schemes. Grant-in-aid from the State is erratic and has not showed up in two years now.
Some people from the village also hold government jobs—despite this they continue to lay claims to benefits from central schemes by declaring themselves 'marginal'.
This could, in part, explain why an absurd 71 percent of Nagaland State’s population is shown by the State’s Food & Civil Supplies Department to be dependent on it. Less than 28% of households in Nagaland are earning above Rs. 12,500 per month or around Rs. 410 per day; the rest either survive as marginal farmers or daily wage earners, revealed a report appearing in The Morung Express on April 11 based on State derived statistics.
So while most people, statistically speaking, are dependent on the State, the State itself is almost completely dependent on the Indian Union government. Another report divulged that Nagaland State received 92.5 percent of its financial resources for 2015-16 from the central Union government.
As roads continue to remain the way they are, and the only perceptible infrastructure development is in terms of private property, is all the money going towards the basic upkeep—food, shelter—of the projected economically marginalized of the State?
Unlikely.
The Indian Union government is happy to dole out endless cash to states like Nagaland or Jammu & Kashmir. The above statistics only confirm the long held belief that this weakness is amply exploited by people/governments on the margins. There is no allegiance to the Indian State through direct taxes and money is endlessly drawn into a bottomless pit—this, in turn, leads to “unabated” corruption in bureaucratic and political governance.
If militarization was not enough, economic and political colonization have crippled whatever remained of the Naga self determining capacity. Central schemes have been designed to take over control of the Indian Union’s federal structure. The more states rely on these, the lesser independence they retain within the Union. Meanwhile, money that is poured into states like Nagaland, for instance, is immediately pooled back into the Indian economy (everything in the markets here is imported from the economic power banks of the Indian subcontinent) that backs and bails its own corporate mafia. On the other hand are political parties which have been spending up to Rs. 937 crore (total estimate drawn from 2013 elections by YouthNet) to buy votes thereby destroying local politics but continuing the drama of elections every five years to fulfill the criteria to draw more central funds.
No wonder, then, that a Morung Poll on happiness had 69% people vouching for a sad state of affairs with no choice but to cooperatively laugh along. The longer this continues, the lesser people will continue to put up with colonization of all sorts.
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