Imlisanen Jamir
Zero roads completed under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana Phase-III in Nagaland is not a statistic that requires much interpretation. And yet the manner in which PWD Minister G Kaito Aye chose to present it to the Assembly on Tuesday deserves closer attention than the number itself. Responding to a starred question from MLA Nuklutoshi, Aye offered four reasons for the delay: the unfamiliarity of contractors with Full Depth Reclamation technology, the thirteen-month locking of the OMMAS portal by the Ministry of Rural Development, an unusually prolonged monsoon through 2025, and a five-month disruption caused by migration to the SNA-SPARSH financial system.
Each of these, taken separately, sounds like a reasonable obstacle that any infrastructure department might encounter. Taken together, they form something closer to an alibi than an explanation, a catalogue assembled to demonstrate that nothing which went wrong was actually the state government's doing. This is worth noticing because it is the pattern that governs so much of how public institutions account for failure, where a minister can stand before a legislature and list four external causes without once being asked what the department itself might have done differently, and where the length and specificity of the list substitutes for any real reckoning with outcome.
The OMMAS lock and the SNA-SPARSH transition were indeed decisions made in Delhi, and the monsoon was certainly not manufactured in Kohima. But a state PWD department exists precisely to plan around the kind of disruption that recurs with predictable regularity in Nagaland's terrain and climate. Plus, a department that requires three to four months merely to mobilise machinery for a technology it has known was coming since March 2024 is describing a failure of preparation as though it were an act of nature.
The revised deadline of March 2028 compounds the problem rather than resolving it. NRIDA's extension, offered nationally in recognition of constraints faced across states, gives Nagaland roughly two additional years to complete work that work orders for Batch-I projects, issued as far back as March 2024, should by any reasonable measure have made substantial progress on already. Whether this extension represents an honest recalibration of what is achievable, or simply a mechanism by which the current administration inherits a longer runway and thereby escapes scrutiny for the two years already lost, is the question the Assembly itself did not appear to ask on September 1.
None of this is to say the state carries the blame alone. The central migration to SNA-SPARSH and the extended OMMAS lock genuinely originated outside Kohima, and any fair account of the delay has to hold Delhi answerable for administrative decisions made with apparently little regard for how long states would need to adjust. But naming those external causes cannot become a substitute for asking what internal readiness would have looked like. Until Nagaland's Assembly begins treating ministerial answers as a starting point for follow-up rather than a closing statement, roads promised under PMGSY-III will remain, as they are today, unbuilt.
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