Imlilsanen Jamir
When the Directorate of Economics and Statistics releases monthly industrial production data, the numbers tend to travel quickly through government press notes and into the public record without much scrutiny of what, precisely, they are measuring. The March 2026 figures for Nagaland deserve a closer reading than that.
The General Index of Industrial Production for the state rose to 193.10, representing a year-on-year growth of 85.05% The Manufacturing Sector Index climbed from 371.05 to 530.24. The Electricity Sector Index, most striking of all, registered a year-on-year growth of 217.85%. These are not modest figures. They are the sort of numbers that, in a state with a more diversified industrial base, would warrant a press conference and a budget revision. In Nagaland, they warrant a question or two instead.
The first question concerns the base itself. Nagaland’s IIP is compiled from a small pool of reporting factories, power grid data, and mining records. When the universe of production units is narrow, a single factory running at full capacity in one month versus reduced output in the corresponding month of the previous year can move the index dramatically. An 85% headline growth rate may describe a genuine expansion of industrial activity, or it may describe nothing more than a favourable comparison against a poor March in 2025. The Directorate’s quick estimates, by their own description, are preliminary. They are a starting point, not a verdict.
The electricity figure invites particular scrutiny. A 217% year-on-year increase in electricity sector growth sits alongside a well-established structural fact: Nagaland generates very little of its own power. The state has historically depended on other states for close to 90% of its electricity requirement, with its own hydro projects running well below installed capacity for much of the year. In March 2026, peak demand stood at 175 MW. The IIP’s electricity component tracks generation, not consumption or availability. What the 217% figure may be capturing is not a transformed power sector but a single season’s improvement in water levels at a hydro station, or a month when purchased power moved through the state’s grid without incident. The lights in Dimapur and Kohima do not always reflect what the index shows.
This is not to say the numbers are wrong. They may be entirely accurate within the methodology the Directorate applies. But accuracy within a methodology and meaningful industrial progress are not the same thing. National IIP growth in the same period ran at under five percent year-on-year. Nagaland’s 85% figure does not sit alongside that comparison as proof of an industrialising state; it sits alongside it as a reminder that percentage changes off a small base can produce large numbers that describe small realities.
Assam, the largest economy in the Northeast, has been building investible industrial land, expanding agro-processing, and courting investment through successive editions of the Advantage Assam summits. Tripura has pursued food processing and rubber industries with some consistency. Even where Northeast states have struggled industrially, the struggle has been visible in a range of sectors and in data that covers a genuinely diverse base. Nagaland’s index rests on manufacturing outputs collected directly from producing factories, electricity drawn from the national power portal, and coal production figures from the Directorate of Geology and Mining. Whether that base is growing, or whether March simply went better than March last year, is a question the index alone cannot answer.
None of this is an argument against releasing the data, or against taking some satisfaction in figures that point upward rather than down. It is an argument for reading them with the same care that was taken in compiling them. A state that has long struggled to diversify its economy beyond government employment and the informal sector has every reason to want its industrial numbers to mean something. That is precisely why it is worth asking, each time they are released, what exactly they mean.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
