Every year, as the monsoon draws near, a familiar ritual unfolds in Dimapur, inspection tours are conducted, meetings are chaired, directives are issued and assurances are made. This year has been no different. When Nagaland’s Chief Secretary visited flood-prone localities last week, Nagarjan, Vilhume, Burma Camp, Sunrise Colony, the same causes were identified that have been documented for years - clogged drains, encroached drainage channels and inadequate infrastructure. The ground has not changed. Nor, it appears, has the approach.
It would be unfair to dismiss official concern as entirely performative. The Chief Secretary’s instructions were pointed, strainers to be installed across upstream nalas, waste segregation to begin at the household level, garbage vehicles to be repaired, sanitation inspectors to be empowered. The Deputy Commissioner reported that drainage clearance operations had already been activated and that an emergency response structure was in place. These are not insignificant measures. But the question that deserves to be asked is whether measures announced at the onset of every monsoon season can still be described as urgent, or whether they have quietly become routine.
At the root of the crisis lies a waste management failure of extraordinary persistence. Plastic waste clogs the city’s drainage systems. The dumping site at Sunrise Colony is approaching saturation. Garbage collection vehicles are poorly maintained despite adequate manpower. These are not new revelations. They are recurring findings that have survived multiple administrations, multiple directives, and multiple monsoon seasons intact.
The introduction of the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2026, mandating four-stream segregation of wet, dry, sanitary and special care waste was intended to signal a stronger national commitment to waste governance. Yet, as a scientist from the Nagaland Pollution Control Board has observed, the state struggled to implement even the simpler three-bin system under the 2016 rules. The newer mandate, with its requirements for digital tracking, restrictions on organic waste in landfills, and state-level compliance monitoring, will demand capacities that Nagaland has not yet built. The terrain is difficult, communities are diverse, household participation remains extremely low, and enforcement is weak. These are not excuses; they are documented realities that any credible plan must contend with.
What is troubling is not the complexity of these challenges, it is the gap between the sophistication of official language and the inadequacy of official action. Awareness campaigns have been conducted for years. Their insufficiency has been acknowledged by the very officials who conducted them. The NPCB scientist was candid, awareness alone cannot drive change unless accompanied by enforcement, penalties and accountability. This is not a novel insight. It is a conclusion that should already have reshaped programme design.
The Chief Secretary’s appeal to citizens to pay sanitation charges and segregate waste at source is reasonable, but it asks something of residents that municipal bodies have not yet demonstrated themselves. Services that are unreliable do not inspire compliance. A public that watches garbage collection vehicles break down repeatedly, and sees drainage channels blocked year after year, cannot easily be persuaded that its participation will make a difference. Trust, in this case, must be earned through consistent service delivery before it can be asked for.
There are ideas worth pursuing in what has been proposed. The suggestion of redirecting food waste to pig farms, building local kabadi networks, creating model communities to demonstrate compliance, these approaches are grounded in local realities rather than imported templates. Community-level movements have historically achieved what top-down mandates have not in Nagaland. That knowledge should inform how flood mitigation and waste management are structured going forward.
What is needed, however, is not another cycle of inspections followed by instructions followed by inaction. What is needed is accountability with memory, a system in which the failure to implement last year’s directives is explicitly acknowledged before this year’s are issued. Flood preparedness cannot be seasonal. Waste management reform cannot be announced annually and deferred indefinitely. The monsoon, unlike official attention, arrives on schedule.
The Chief Secretary was reported to have said that municipal bodies would be held directly accountable for solid waste management. That accountability, if it is to mean anything, must outlast the inspection tour.
