Relief camps to lifelines: Manipur’s displaced build a new economy while waiting to go home

Imphal: Rita Laishom stands behind a narrow counter inside the relief camp at Lamboikhongnangkhong in Imphal West, straightening biscuit packets and keeping an eye on what’s left of the day’s stock. The shop is small, improvised, and wedged into a space never meant for commerce. It exists because the camp has stopped being a stopgap.

“We thought we would be away from home for maybe a week or a month at the most. Now it's going to be three years,” muttered 43-year-old Rita, an internally displaced person from Motbung in Kangpokpi district.


Rita and her husband, Hemanta, fled when violence erupted in Manipur in May 2023, like thousands who left with a few clothes and essential documents, convinced they would return in days. Relief camps were opened as emergency shelters — temporary roofs for a temporary crisis. But months stretched, and the camps began to harden into something else: a fragile neighbourhood, a survival zone, a place where waiting had to be filled with work.

Inside Lamboikhongnangkhong, the couple now runs a grocery shop that sells rice, oil, salt, soap, and whatever else they can afford to bring in. Much of it goes out on credit, because cash is scarce and needs are constant. Borrowed money became their starting capital; necessity became their business plan.

Parents of two, they decided they couldn’t keep living as if life were paused. “We have to raise our children, ensure them a good future. We cannot simply rely on govt aid, which we barely received, and decided to open this shop in April last year. We also used to run a shop at Motbung,” Rita told TOI.

Hemanta’s worry runs beyond the present day’s sales. He hears the govt speak of resettlement, but he measures the future in practical questions — what happens to the small livelihoods built inside the camp, and what will sustain families once they are moved. “We want to return home. It’s been nearly three years since we have been staying at a relief camp. The govt is talking about resettlement, but it should also prioritise how we are supposed to survive once we are resettled,” Hemanta said, adding small businesses like theirs will suffer.

The camp around them looks less like an emergency shelter now and more like a settlement assembled from repetition. Narrow lanes run between structures. Clotheslines cut across walkways. Children weave through rows of shelters, turning limited space into a playground. Women sit together, weaving clothes, building routine into days that were once defined by uncertainty.

Across Manipur, similar transformations have taken place. Relief camps that began as humanitarian responses have developed internal economies — tea stalls, tailoring corners, vegetable vendors — small enterprises that don’t erase displacement but make it livable. The work is modest, the margins thin, but the activity signals something important: people are no longer only waiting to be helped; they are trying to hold their lives together.

At the Akampat relief camp in Imphal East, 64-year-old Oinam Rajen has returned to the trade he once practiced in Moreh. He borrowed a sewing machine from a friend in Imphal and began again, not because the camp offered opportunity, but because it offered no alternative.

“It must be about one year after the violence that I started tailoring works again. I could hardly earn enough to survive, but it gives me a sense of purpose. Nobody wants to hire an old man like me for manual labour, which many of the IDPs are engaged in,” he stated.

His customers are few — mostly parents who need school uniforms altered for their children. The tools are incomplete, the setup bare. “I don’t even have a worktable or an iron, just managing with what I have,” he stated.

Like Rita, Rajen once believed the camp would be brief. The longer it lasted, the more the early assumptions began to feel like a different lifetime. His frustration is sharpened by comparisons to more recent incidents. “It would have been better had the govt acted swiftly to contain violence, just like when there were clashes recently at Litan in Ukhrul district,” he said with resentment.

Those who manage camp life say the changes are visible not only in the makeshift businesses, but in the way people have been forced to reinvent themselves. Convenor of Akampat Relief Camp Committee, Ningthoujam Samananda—also an IDP from Moreh—describes a community that has had to evolve to endure.

“Many inmates have switched professions just to survive. Youth volunteers are running informal tuition classes for younger children. Small shops and eateries have come up, and almost everyone is trying to earn their livelihood through menial work,” he stated.

Samananda was among IDP representatives who met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Droupadi Murmu during their Manipur visit. The concerns, he says, have been stated clearly, but the ground reality remains stubborn. “Yet there hasn’t been much visible progress when it comes to resettling the IDPs to their original places,” he lamented and drew the attention of the govt to ensure the dignified resettlement of IDPs.

Govt authorities continue to reiterate commitments to rehabilitation and safe return, with security deployments in sensitive areas. In January, Manipur chief secretary Puneet Kumar Goel said the government is targeting to resettle more than 10,000 displaced families consisting of more than 40,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) by March this year. Many IDPs say they have heard timelines before, and watched them pass without change.

Nearly three years after violence reshaped lives across Manipur, the camps remain full, and the idea of “temporary” has worn thin. In the lanes between shelters, survival has become routine—measured in borrowed machines, credit notebooks, altered uniforms, and biscuit packets lined up for sale—while the hope of going home persists, waiting for a date that still hasn’t arrived.