In Tousem, a cluster of hamlets tucked into Manipur’s Tamenglong district, the sick were once carried to hospital on bamboo stretchers because there was no road wide enough for a vehicle to pass, and villagers had to first wade across a river and then trudge for five hours to reach the nearest town.
For 30 years, the Manipur and central governments had sanctioned, surveyed and then abandoned the 100-km link that could have changed this. It took a newly posted sub-divisional officer, a refused funding request and a Facebook page to finally get it built.
A government that would not build a road
In 2012, Armstrong Pame, a 28-year-old officer of the 2009 batch of the Indian Administrative Service, was appointed sub-divisional magistrate of Tousem. He belonged to Tamenglong himself, and as the first IAS officer from the Zeme Naga community, he understood the terrain his posting asked him to serve.
The Tamenglong-Haflong road, meant to connect Tousem to the rest of Manipur as well as to Assam and Nagaland, had first been included in the Sixth Five Year Plan of the early 1980s.
What began with Pame’s personal savings grew into a community effort, with around ₹40 lakh raised from people across India and the diaspora. The road eventually became known as the People’s Road. Photograph: (AI-Generated image)
Public works crews laid some of it through that decade, the Border Roads Organisation declined to take up the rest in 1997 over a faulty alignment, and ministerial visits in 2006 and 2011 produced assurances but no construction.
When Pame formally asked the state government to fund the missing stretch, the request was turned down for lack of resources.
A road paid for from Delhi to New York
Rather than wait, Pame turned to his own family and to Facebook. He put in Rs 5 lakh of his own savings, his brother, who taught at Delhi University, added Rs 1 lakh, and his mother contributed a month of his father’s pension. He then opened a Facebook page appealing for donations, and the response startled him.
A stranger in the United States pledged $2,500 overnight, and a Sikh man in New York followed with $3,000. As word spread through media coverage, contributions arrived from collection points set up in Delhi, Pune, Bengaluru, Chennai, Guwahati, Shillong and Dimapur, and from the Indian diaspora in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Before the road, villagers in Tousem had to cross a river and walk for five hours to reach the nearest town. In February 2013, after just seven months of construction, their 100-km link to the outside world was inaugurated. Photograph: (NDTV)
Around Rs 40 lakh was eventually raised, enough to hire bulldozers and earthmovers but not to pay for labour.
In a country where a handful of ordinary citizens have single-handedly carved roads through hillsides with nothing but a hammer and chisel, Pame’s project was collective from the start. Around 250 villagers, more than 100 of them women, turned up with spades on the day construction began.
When Pame asked what they were doing, one told him simply, “It is our road, we are doing it with you, Sir.” Construction started in August 2012, paused through the monsoon, and resumed weeks later, with villagers clearing thickets with machetes and daos, and supplying fuel, food and lodging for the work crews.
Miracle Man of Tousem
The road was completed in seven months and inaugurated on 17 February, 2013, at Katangnam village, where a monolith now carries the names of everyone who contributed. It came to be known as the People’s Road, and Pame was thereafter called the Miracle Man across Manipur.
He was nominated for the CNN-IBN Indian of the Year award in the public service category that year, flown to Facebook’s California headquarters to describe the project, and later conferred with India’s Most Eminent IAS Officer Award in 2015 and a Distinguished IAS Officers Award in 2021.
As district collector of Tamenglong, he has since opened his home to schoolchildren from across the district for a weekly dinner, telling them he hopes it gives them “a zeal to do well to live their dreams.”
Pame went on to serve in postings across India, including as director in the Department of School Education and Literacy and later as joint secretary in the Union Ministry of Higher Education, before being repatriated to the Manipur cadre in May 2026, joining a long line of district officers whose everyday decisions have quietly reshaped governance from the ground up.
The 100 km of road he helped raise, mostly in sums of a few hundred rupees at a time, remains the clearest evidence in Tamenglong that patience with government promises has its limits, and that a community given the chance to build for itself rarely wastes it.
