Manipur farmers watched helplessly as strict lockdown reduced crop to waste

Bishnupur, Manipur: For the farmers of Kwasiphai in Manipur's Bishnupur district, there seems to be no end to their troubles. They were looking forward to a good harvest from their first cycle of crops this year. Kwasiphai and two other villages, Khoijuman Khullen and Toubul, contribute over 30% to the state's total vegetable production but are reeling under the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown. Additionally, the police station near the agricultural fields only added to the woes of the farmers, who claim to be under the strict surveillance of the police.Moirangthem Eni, 28, and her husband Somesh, 28, cultivate vegetables on a sangam (a traditional unit of land measurement, 1 sangam~0.625 acre) of leased land, with one loushal (1 loushal~0.15625 acre) earmarked for paddy as they have to pay it to the landowner. In the rest of the land, they cultivated tomatoes, cucumbers and okra. With money borrowed from moneylenders, the young couple claimed that they spent over Rs 50,000 in growing these vegetables. However, as the state went into complete lockdown along with the rest of the country towards the end of March, the couple watched helplessly as their vegetables primed for harvesting were left to rot in the field.Moirangthem Somesh and Eni at their newly tilled land where they plan to grow pulses this time. Credits: Armstrong ChanambamWith the curfew imposed, no trader could visit the village to buy the vegetables and they were forced to dump the vegetables in the field, Eni recounted.Moreover, owing to Kwasiphai’s proximity to the Bishnupur Police Station, many farmers claimed that the agricultural labourers, who help out in the harvesting process, couldn’t venture out during the curfew.Even those who managed to hire help for the harvest during the lockdown, with the expectation of selling them promptly, suffered as no trader could get past the police checkposts nearby and enter the village, Eni said.Farmers incur huge lossesIn a nearby field, Haobijam Reshma, 34, also incurred losses after failing to find buyers for her peas and kidney beans. She reportedly spent Rs 30,000 in growing the crops but failed to recover the money spent. She was left with no choice but to sell the vegetables inside her village at throwaway prices in huge quantities.Landowning farmers such as Naorem Subol, 47, fared no better. He owns two sangam of land but has also been farming on another sangam on lease. He paid a rent of Rs 1.4 lakh for three years. He is unaware of the actual loss he had to incur but estimates that it is about Rs 1 lakh. He said he managed to sell his produce wholesale whenever there were few hours of curfew relaxation.Naorem Subol at his cauliflower farm. Credits: Armstrong ChanambamSubol also revealed that he lost all his cauliflower crop when the government further extended the lockdown in August. "Most farmers are reluctant to admit that they have suffered losses. I gave away my agricultural produce to traders without even bothering to take the advance. I had a difficult time collecting money from them and barely managed to take a lump sum amount of Rs 30,000. Most farmers I know here must have lost over Rs 1 lakh [each] during this pandemic," Subol confided. From March to May, most farmers suffered a lot and ran helter-skelter without any idea of what they should do, Subol stated.The police strictly enforced the lockdown and those who ventured out of their homes with the intention of visiting their fields were being chased away with lathis and as the police station is located nearby, the village was prone to frequent police raids, he reminisced. Another landowning farmer Oinam Tomba, 45, who planted bitter gourd and green chilly only managed to earn Rs 4,000 during the lockdown by selling his bitter gourd. He claimed that he could have got Rs 70,000 for the bitter gourd and added that he couldn’t even sell the green chilly yield. Traders like Irengbam Apabi Devi, who is a resident of Kwasiphai, used to sell vegetables procured from the village at Moirang Bazaar, an important market in the district. She rued that the global pandemic has not only affected them but also discouraged the farmers from continuing with their agricultural activities. Irengbam Apabi( left) at a waiting shed in Kwashiphai where she sells vegetables. Credits: Armstrong ChanambamEver since the pandemic began, the business has gone down by almost 75%, she estimated. She mentioned that earlier they would sell vegetables worth Rs 17,000 in a day, but claimed that vegetables worth Rs 4,000 remain unsold for four days now.(This article is a part of a series on Covid’s impact on India’s marginal farmers. The series has been funded by Internews Europe.)

Internet shutdowns cripple fledgling IT industry in Manipur

Opinions are divided among IT companies in Manipur on the impact of the 12-day internet shutdown in end December 2016 on their business and revenue. With their internet-service provider (ISP) vehemently denying there was an internet shutdown some IT companies even retracted their earlier statement of the net ban affecting their operations.In mid-December, mobile internet services were suspended in Imphal west and Imphal east on the orders of district magistrates after weeks of unrest led to series of attacks on a prominent church and the police.Rohsnikumar Yambem, CEO of Globizs Web Solutions Company, claims that even broadband-network connections received through optical fibre cables were not spared from the third day of the net ban, leaving a dent in his annual turnover. He says his company lost around Rs.6 lakhs during the net shutdown as more than half his 22-member production team were rendered unproductive.“We manage around 600 websites in Manipur and provide live web support to at least 200 clients. During the internet shutdown any kind of updates for our clients, including government tender notifications, was impossible. Our main server is maintained in the cloud. Quick Books, the accounting software we use, is accessed online and we were not able to update our accounts for ten days. Neither were we able to create invoices or receipts,” he says.“As a purely IT company, we encourage our clients to become totally IT-enabled,” he adds. “We lead by example and demonstrate how a product or system works before selling it to them. We also use HR software and marketing software. The sales teams we dispatch in hill districts like Ukhrul and Senapati send marketing reports in real time online through mobile apps. Everything went for a toss during the shutdown.”Each of Globizs’ 50 employees generates revenues of nearly Rs. 50,000 per month, which after deducting salaries and expenses, earns the company a net profit of roughly Rs.10,000. Yambem insists that more than half of his web-design staffs were rendered idle by the net ban.“We focused more on bill collection during that period and some of our staff from the production team worked on data already stored in our internal system,” he recounts. “The shutdown came when we were reeling under the impact of demonetization. Our annual turnover in 2016 was a little over Rs 90 lakhs,” he says against the normal Rs. 2 to 3 crores. But Yambem later retracted all these statements and directed this reporter to meet the CEO of Skay Broadband Service, the private ISP providing high-speed internet connections to over 600 clients in Imphal.Arun Kumar Soibam, CEO of Skay, brushed aside any suggestions of an internet shutdown in December 2016 affecting web solutions companies such as Globizs, asserting that the ban was confined only to mobile data services. Says Wahenbam Priyananda, managing director of Cobigent Technology and Solutions, “As far I remember, the Internet was totally inaccessible for three days when even browsing was not possible. No work whatsoever could be conducted during these three days as we were running a call centre back then,” he recalls.Talking over the phone from Guwahati, Priyananda said he could not be able to place an exact figure on his financial losses without consulting the records, but the shutdown certainly affected Cobigent’s revenue. Sangai Technology, that along with Cobigent and two others IT companies share office space at the Manipur IT Park in Mantripukhi, saw its annual turnover decline by 35 % due to the shutdown, dropping from around Rs.1.3 crore to a little over Rs.72 lakh in 2016. Loukrakpam Rishidev Singh, Sangai’s IT-operation manager, recalls that following the net ban, his company spent nearly 50,000 dispatching staff to provide solutions to his biggest client, a multinational company in Noida. He says they earn a net profit of around Rs.80,000 per month from this client but, in the absence of an agreement to cover such a contingency, Sangai had to absorb these expenses. Sangai provides live web support and day-to-day maintenance to 10 of its clients of whom six are from within the state. “We earned around Rs. 3.5 lakh per day from these clients and incurred losses of at least Rs. 35 lakhs during the shutdown,” he says.Singh says that Sangai, which was launched in November 2015, has found it extremely difficult to find clients and the net shutdown only compounded the problem. “Even if the Internet shutdown was officially limited to cellular-data services, there was no steady data package from the second day of the net ban and we could not serve our clients,” he says.Singh narrates how his team painstakingly instructed the system administrators over the phone on what needed to be done whenever a bug appeared in the web applications or pages they had created. “We receive an immediate bug report in our server whenever a bug appears in our web applications or pages that we have created. We provide web support to our clients by offering solutions from our end. During the shutdown, we could not receive any such report nor can examine or access the situation as we don't have any visuals of our clients' web pages,” he explains.

Life of a human rights activist, a photo essay

Activist speak: Misinformation in ManipurIn Manipur, a blanket Internet ban shut down any chance of fighting rumours with facts.  1: Manipuri women don’t shy away from leading from the front. For close to five centuries they have held sway at Ema Keithel, a market operated and controlled exclusively by women. Every day thousands of people throng the bustling streets leading up to the two market complexes to shop for their daily essentials. 2: In this photo from December 2016, women take out a torch rally in Imphal to protest against the ‘three controversial bills’, so dubbed after the massive protests that their drafting and introduction in the Manipur Legislative Assembly kicked up. The three bills sought to regulate the entry of non-tribals into tribal lands. 3: The ensuing protests turned violent and paralysed the state. Here, a group of women from Churachandpur district sing hymns to pay homage to nine people killed during one such protest. 4: On December 18, the government shut down the Internet. Pictured here tending to his backyard, human rights activist Babloo Loitongbam said, the 12-day long information blackout was a waste of precious time and opportunity to fight the rumours and inflammatory statements with facts and logical arguments. The shutdown only aggravated the situation as all attempts to mitigate the tension created by passing the three controversial bills by uploading their exact contents failed. 5: Loitongbam, a Fulbright scholar and now the founder and executive director of Human Rights Alert (HRA), says the internet shutdown prevented saner voices from explaining that the bills didn’t, in fact, impinge on the rights of the tribal communities who were so vehemently protesting it. The panicked reaction from the government only added into the confusion, he says. Seen here over a road near the base of a two-lane flyover bridge in Imphal, where a woman protester stands guard as a pyre burns in the background.6: The internet is only a medium of exercising one's freedom of expression and people must have the right to decide the truth for themselves, he says. A long-time associate of Iron Sharmila, here he is seen in 2015 taking part in a sit-in to express solidarity with her as she entered the 15th year of her indefinite hunger strike.7: And Loitomgbam knows what it is like to live under a perpetual internet shutdown. Despite switching internet service providers, his troubles with poor connectivity at work and home persist; repeated complaints to the regional office of the Shillong-based service providers didn’t seem to solve the issue. 8: The inside joke among his associates at the HRA is that there is a bug installed somewhere in the office that is sabotaging their Internet. It has sinister implications. After all, Loitomgbam, through HRA, has been documenting human rights violations, organising victims and striving to provide them with redressal mechanisms. Normal 0 false false false EN-IN X-NONE X-NONE <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:1; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:0 0 0 0 0 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073786111 1 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin-top:0cm; margin-right:0cm; margin-bottom:8.0pt; margin-left:0cm; line-height:107%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:EN-IN; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:11.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:EN-IN; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} .MsoPapDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; margin-bottom:8.0pt; line-height:107%;} @page WordSection1 {size:595.3pt 841.9pt; margin:72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt; mso-header-margin:35.4pt; mso-footer-margin:35.4pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:8.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:107%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-IN; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} 9: Whenever the patchy internet disrupts his emails to and from other human rights organisations across the country and rest of the world, he visits Venus Net, one of the most popular cyber cafes in Kwakeithal Bazaar. But that December, there was nothing. All cyber cafes were shut, which gave those spreading misinformation a free rein for more than 10 days and disallowing those trying to diffuse the situation by presenting the ground reality, says Loitomgbam.