Imlisanen Jamir
What the Numbers Do Not Say
Rs 1,639 a month. That is what the bottom half of Nagaland’s households earns, according to the Report on Income Disparity in Nagaland 2025, released by the Department of Economics and Statistics. Not spends. Earns. Work the arithmetic and it comes to roughly Rs 55 a day. The report presents this figure with the calm neutrality of a government document, surrounded by Gini coefficients and district-wise breakdowns, and perhaps that neutrality is the most troubling thing about it. Rs 55 a day is not a data point. It is a daily impossibility that roughly half the people in this State are somehow living inside.
Now consider the other end. The top 5% of urban households earns an average of Rs 1.43 lakh per month, the same report shows. That word, average, deserves some attention. An average flattens the peaks. It pulls the very high down toward the merely high and presents the result as a representative figure. What it conceals is the ceiling: the household at the top of that top 5%, whose income is not Rs 1.43 lakh but possibly several times more. The report is a household income survey based on self-declared earnings, conducted between October and December 2024. It records what people reported. It cannot record what people chose not to report: assets accumulated over decades, income flowing through contracts and political arrangements, property generating returns that never appear in any survey. The wealthiest people in Nagaland are largely absent from this data. What we are reading is a portrait of inequality with its most unequal figures missing.
This matters because the numbers that are present are already beyond what most people can emotionally process. People feel the difference between Rs 1,639 and Rs 10,000. They do not feel, in any gut sense, the difference between Rs 10,000 and Rs 10 lakh, or between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 10 crore. The numbers become abstract, and when inequality becomes abstract it loses the power to produce outrage. A society can read a report showing that the top 5% earns 43 times what the bottom 50% earns and respond with mild concern and no particular urgency, because 43 times is a phrase, not an experience. Extreme inequality sustains itself partly because its true scale is simply incomprehensible to most of the people living inside it.
There is one district figure worth pausing over. Longleng recorded the highest Gini coefficient in the State at 0.492, and also the highest inequality in both its rural and urban areas, according to the report. Longleng is among Nagaland’s smaller districts and does not carry the administrative weight of Kohima or the commercial activity of Dimapur. Within whatever economic activity exists there, someone has still managed to corner a disproportionate share. This is what the report demonstrates, district by district: inequality is not a consequence of prosperity going wrong somewhere along the way. It is a feature of how power works, and power works this way wherever people are, including in the most remote corners of the State.
The report will be filed, cited in future policy documents, and gradually forgotten. The Gini coefficient of 0.46 will become a reference number. And Rs 55 a day will remain what it has always been: not a statistic, but the daily arithmetic of half this State’s households, quietly worked out each morning before anyone else is awake.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
