What Is Missing Give
A young child stands at a camp window, face pressed near the glass and a sheet of plastic, looking directly out through a weathered orange door frame.

A field report & appeal · Manipur, India

What if the violence learned to wait?

Three years after the violence, more than fifty-eight thousand people are still living in relief camps in Manipur. This is what was taken from them — water, a toilet, a school, a doctor, a future — set down plainly, because the people living it have run out of gentler ways to say it.

By A. Vikramaditya · Reported from Imphal and Churachandpur

Begin the descent

The crisis in four numbers

  1. 58,821 People still displaced, March 2026
  2. ~25,000 Children uprooted by the conflict
  3. 3 years In camps since May 2023
  4. ₹84/day The cash they are told is enough

Seven camps · Imphal & Churachandpur

Seven camps, one pattern

The school is not a school any more. The blackboard is still bolted to the wall. The desks are gone. In their place: a mattress on the floor, a steel trunk, a clothesline, a family of four. This was the first of seven camps. In every one the same thing had been done — a building made for one kind of life emptied out and packed with a smaller, more frightened one.

Children gather at the camp gate to meet the camera, their faces blurred for protection, used to being looked at after three years in the camps.
The welcome The children always were the first to meet me at the gate. After three years in these camps, looking at a camera just sparks their curiosity.

Four camps in Imphal, three in Churachandpur, across the line that now cuts the state in two. In each, when I walked in with a camera, the children came first. They are used to being looked at. NGOs come, reporters come, officials come, and then they leave, and nothing moves. Being photographed is the closest thing to help most of them have had in three years.

One long hall partitioned by hanging tarpaulin sheets and string into a grid of small household squares, the row of makeshift rooms receding into the dim.
The scale One hall, partitioned with tarpaulin and string into a grid of households. Multiply it across camps, and again across the state.
A women's college hostel in Akampat, Imphal East, now used as a relief camp; its old painted signboard still fixed above the entrance, advertising the building it used to be.
Akampat, Imphal East A women’s college hostel, taken over as a camp. The signboard still advertises the building it used to be.

On 3 May 2023, fighting broke out between the Meitei of the valley and the Kuki-Zo of the hills, and the state was pulled apart along a line that runs through schools, hospitals, churches and homes. More than two hundred and fifty people are dead; tens of thousands were driven out. Amnesty International calls conditions in the camps “inhumane.”

What follows is not arranged camp by camp. It is arranged by what is missing — because the same things are missing everywhere, and stacked together they stop looking like bad luck and start looking like a decision.

I

Water, and a bill no one will pay

A man stands barefoot in his single room in Churachandpur, a blue water tank, drums and buckets ranged along the wall beside a striped cloth partition.
Churachandpur · Water A month’s water against the days the supply fails: drums and buckets ranged around one man’s only room.

Start with water, because the body does. In one Churachandpur camp a single working hand pump serves the whole shelter — every family, every pot, every wash, one spout. In the Imphal camps the supply comes when it comes. Between times, families hoard it in drums and buckets along the walls and measure it out by the mug.

At one camp the residents are made to pay the camp’s water bill themselves — people who have lost everything, billed to keep the taps from being cut. India has signed conventions that give displaced people the same right to water as any other citizen.

One pump and an unpaid bill is the answer they got. That is not scarcity. It is a decision about whose thirst counts.
A boy, his face blurred for protection, bathes from green and blue household water drums on bare dirt at the edge of an open dump.
Where the water is drawn A boy takes a bath from the household drums at the edge of an open dump. This is the water they cook and wash with.

The supply fails for days at a time. The cleanest water they will touch all week is the puddle they are kneeling in.

II

The washrooms

If one thing was wrong in every single camp, it was the toilets — makeshift, filthy, broken, or abandoned, doors hanging off, floors fouled, the stalls left to rot.

A social worker who has been through the Churachandpur camps says thousands are “compelled to defecate, bathe and wash in open spaces … with absolutely no privacy.” Where the toilets get cleaned, the displaced clean them.

Four corrugated-tin toilet stalls and a water tank stand in a row on bare ground at the lip of an open dump, their doors weathered and hanging.
The toilets · 1–4 Four tin stalls and a tank for a camp of hundreds, set at the lip of an open dump.
The toilets thousands queue for, and the daily choice they force between dignity and a wash.

Residents say a local MLA was shown the state of the sanitation once, and other local officials many times. Nothing changed. Inside the stalls there is nothing to add.

A small child, his face blurred for protection, is washed on a concrete step an arm’s length from a heap of wet rubbish at the edge of the camp.
No bathroom A child washed on the open step, an arm’s length from the wet rubbish. To him it is simply the air he has grown up in.
III

No place to hide

No place to hide · the screen The screen the women rigged — the one privacy they made for themselves. We do not photograph past it.

For women and girls the same missing thing turns into a threat. Children bathe in the open. In one camp the women rigged their own bathing screen at the edge of the compound — a sheet of cloth between their bodies and the road, privacy improvised out of a shame that was never theirs.

It is not theoretical. Reporting from camps on both sides of the buffer zones documents harassment coming from inside the shelters themselves, and a silence that dependence enforces: you do not report the people who hand out the rations. Mothers leave their children in these rooms to go and look for work, and carry that fear with them all day.

Every wash is a calculation of who is watching.
IV

The arithmetic of hunger

Displacement is, first of all, an economic killing. These were farmers, traders, drivers, small store owners, fish-farmers, weavers — people with land and a trade. One night took both. What replaces it is cash and little else.

In the Imphal camps, three thousand rupees a month per person; in Churachandpur, twenty-four hundred. Late in 2025 the state swapped much of the ration for about eighty-four rupees a day — roughly a dollar.

A corner of a camp room used as a kitchen — a small stove and a few pots set on the floor, the family's school bags hung on the wall, and a child's handprints pressed into the paint above them.
The kitchen A camp kitchen: a stove, a few pots, the family's school bags, and a child's handprints on the wall.
“We buy the lowest quality of rice and cannot afford nutritious food. We barely manage.” — A man in an Imphal East camp
A single cooking-gas cylinder stands against the wall of a camp room; on the floor beside it a blackened pot sits over a small heap of firewood, the way the cooking is done once the gas runs out.
No gas One cooking-gas cylinder a month, and it arrives late. When it runs out the cooking moves to firewood on the floor.
A child, face blurred for protection, sits alone on the floor of a dim room eating from a single steel plate, a pedestal fan and a scatter of toys around them.
One plate A child eats alone on the floor of a half-lit room, a fan and a scatter of toys standing in for a home.

The only work the state put inside the camps is a row of handloom machines for the women. The men drive auto-rickshaws, take day labour where it exists, and wait. That is the whole economy now: a thread pulled through a long day, and the waiting.

If you were the parent

You are handed eighty-four rupees a day, per person, and told it is enough. It buys the cheapest rice and nothing that makes a child grow. So you leave them in the room and go out to look for work, and the whole time you are gone you are doing the arithmetic of who is watching your daughter, and whether the hope will hold.

V

A stolen education

What was done to the children is quieter, and it lasts longer. Their schools were among the first buildings taken to house the displaced. In Churachandpur, a zonal education officer reported that of 212 government schools only a fraction still function. The state’s own child-rights commission counts about 25,000 children uprooted.

Where children in the hills learn at all, it is mostly because Kuki-Zo churches and Christian missionaries built community schools to catch them; one such school teaches more than four hundred. The camp-in-charge at the Expo site put the education ministry’s role in a word: absent.

They still aim at a future, which is the hardest part to watch. The camp-in-charge’s own daughter wants to be a doctor. Asked to draw, a nine-year-old in an Imphal camp drew armed men in a truck firing into his village.

30–35%

of displaced children show severe mental-health symptoms — the estimate of clinicians who surveyed the camps.

Source: MCPCR / UNICEF-backed survey, via NENow

A boy, his face blurred for protection, sits in a dim camp room; on the wall behind him a child has painted a girl standing among flowers.
What they still draw Behind the boy, a child has painted a girl among flowers on the wall — a childhood refusing to disappear, in a room where the lights mostly do not work.

“Many children have expressed a desire to join armed groups and pick up weapons, because it is glorified and that is all they see around them. If this continues, we could be looking at an entire generation growing up exposed to violence.”

Letminlen · Aid worker, Churachandpur · to Al Jazeera
A cluster of children’s laminated student ID cards hangs from a single nail on a dark wall, the only visible sign of schooling left to them.
Still enrolled The student IDs of children whose schools fund part of their fee, hung on a nail in the dark — most of the education still provided by a few NGOs and student organisations.

If you were the child

You sleep on a mat on a floor that used to be a classroom, or a hall, or a stage. There is a line on the wall where the paint stops and the damp begins. Your whole family is an arm's reach away, every night, and so is the next family, behind a sheet of plastic.

When you need the toilet you hold your breath before you go in, and you go in anyway, because there is nowhere else. You are hungry in a flat, ordinary way you have stopped mentioning. School is the building you sleep in now; sometimes a church runs a class, sometimes a few volunteers, sometimes not.

You draw the truck and the men and the road, because that is what you saw, and the grown-ups go quiet when you do. You are not allowed to say you are scared. But it rained today, and there was a puddle in the yard, and for one hour you were completely happy — and no one has told you yet that this is not how it is supposed to be.

VI

The sick, and the forgotten

A couple from Moreh sit among everything they salvaged — bundles, trunks, pots and bedding stacked floor to ceiling and balanced wall to wall — pressed into a single camp room smaller than a bed.
A life in a box A family and everything it salvaged, pressed into one room. There is nowhere to put a life this size.

Medicine is one of the first things the camps run out of, which means the people least able to fend for themselves are abandoned first. In the third camp, a couple who fled the border town of Moreh have folded an entire life into a room smaller than a bed — a hundred things stacked and balanced, a split bucket in the corner. The husband is blind. What he needs most does not come.

A narrow wooden shelf against a bare camp wall holds a sparse, half-empty row of medicine bottles and foil strips — most of the slots are bare.
What does not arrive A shelf of bottles and strips against one wall — most of what these camps need in the way of medicine never reaches them.

In one camp a Meitei man with fatty-liver disease gets no real treatment. His family is in Bengaluru; they brought him here and went back. He has told them not to return for him, in case they are caught in the crossfire. He has made his peace, he says, with dying alone — the local missionaries will help cremate the body when the time comes. He described his own end calmly enough to frighten a state into action.

People die without treatment, quietly — while the paperwork of their rescue is still being drafted.
A blind man sits on the floor of his bare room; on the wall behind him someone has written by hand, in pale letters, the words you are so beautiful and God Love You.
A blind man in his room Behind him, scrawled on the wall, the words “you are so beautiful” and “God Love You.”

The young are abandoned the same way as the old.

An elderly grandmother cradles a sleeping infant, the child's face turned away, in a dim and almost unlit camp room — the oldest and the youngest of one displaced family.
The oldest and the youngest A grandmother and an infant in the dark — the two ends of a displacement with no end, and the years between that no one is counting.
VII

Childhood in the mud

A volleyball court improvised from a net of string slung between two bamboo poles, pitched over a field of churned mud, with the camp shelters crowding the far edge.
The court they built A net of string, two bamboo poles, a field of mud — a volleyball court out of nothing, played in the rain as though nothing were wrong.

It rained the day I reached the fourth camp. Three small girls were playing in a pool of mud, one of them throwing stones into it and shrieking, teasing me as I filmed. It is the hardest footage I have — and not because they were sad.

They were not sad. The horror is everything at the edge of the frame — the abandoned toilets a few steps away, the standing water, the camp closing in, and the years they will spend learning to call this normal.

The children make games out of whatever is there. Paper folded into toys. One phone passed hand to hand. Medicine boxes and a pair of scissors, under a mosquito net, by the light of a single bulb.

Children's hands, their faces blurred for protection, sorting medicine boxes and a pair of scissors into a game beneath a mosquito net, lit by a single bulb.
Games from scraps · Inside a mosquito net Invention is the one thing the camps cannot ration.
A mother sits on the bare earth braiding her daughter's hair, the child's face blurred for protection.
On a dirt floor A mother braids her daughter's hair on the bare ground.
An older girl, her face blurred for protection, carries a baby on her hip in a camp corridor.
Children raising children An older girl carries a baby on her hip. Half the childhoods here are spent looking after a smaller one, while their parents are away for work.
Three children, their faces blurred for protection, crouch over a single phone on a half-rolled carpet in a camp corridor.
An afternoon Three children, one phone and a half-rolled carpet, in the corridor that doubles as an imaginary playground.
A partition wall of blue plastic sheeting inside a camp, a small printed plaque fixed to it that still reads "God bless our home."
Still a home A plastic sheet for a wall, and a plaque on it that still reads “God bless our home.”
VIII

The camps that prove it is a choice

Before you decide this is just what war does, look at the last two camps, in the Thangmeiband area of Imphal, run with the local MLA closely involved. It shows in the one place that cannot be faked: the food.

Women sit together on a swept floor in a Thangmeiband camp kitchen, peeling vegetables into steel bowls, the room lit and tended with pots stacked along the wall.
Where ration exists Still one kitchen for the whole block — but lit, tended, stocked with the small dignities the worst camps lack.

Free meals, clean and adequate. The girls housed in a free hostel, schooled free at first — the subsidy was later halved and families now pay part — but the children are cared for in a way I did not see across the divide.

I put these camps last on purpose.

The misery in the others was not inevitable. It was allowed.
Four young siblings, the smallest faces blurred for protection, sit close together on the bed of their tarpaulin-walled partition, folded clothes and a tidy shelf behind them.
One room, four lives Siblings on the bed of their partition. Where someone is accountable, even this holds together.

The distance between the best camp and the worst is not a distance of money. It is whether anyone with power is watching.

IX

The petitions that go unanswered

The displaced have not stayed quiet. They have marched in Imphal in their thousands for a safe return. They have handed the cash back. They have filed grievance after grievance with the officers appointed to hear them; civil-society bodies and opposition leaders have petitioned the governor and the government alike.

Manipur has been under President’s Rule — direct central administration — since February 2025, and still, residents say, nothing reaches the ground.

A camp outreach worker in a cap and red shoulder bag stands holding a sheet of paper, speaking to a group of women seated on stools and on the ground outside a brick camp building.
Complaints, taken down A camp volunteer notes the residents’ grievances. The notebook fills; the answers do not come.

Accountability has been worse than the relief.

12,000+
first-information reports filed since the violence began — killings, sexual assault, abduction, arson.
“unknown”
the name set down for the accused, again and again, as Al Jazeera found.
zero
convictions in three years of investigations.

When the people who burned the houses are official strangers, the people who lost them cannot go home.

Three years of investigations · Source: Al Jazeera, May 2026

X

What would end this

None of this is hard to fix, and the Thangmeiband camps are the proof. Humane conditions in Manipur are a decision, not a possibility.

Residents, aid workers and advocates name a short, blunt list that would change lives this month, not in some announced and receding future:

  1. Pay for the basics, now.

    A guaranteed monthly ration on top of any cash, and an end to displaced families being billed for a camp’s water and electricity.

  2. Treat sanitation as the emergency it is.

    Working, sex-separated toilets and enclosed bathing in every camp, and a guaranteed monthly delivery of cleaning supplies and hygiene kits, including sanitary pads.

  3. Make the camps safe for women and girls.

    Private, lit, lockable washing and toilets, and a real, protected way to report harm.

  4. Put every displaced child back in school.

    Fully fund their education, formally back the church and community schools already doing the work, and expand the mental-health care that UNICEF-supported clinics have shown can reach these children.

  5. Reach the sick before they die waiting.

    A standing medical supply line and mobile clinics for camps where blind, disabled and chronically ill residents now get nothing.

  6. Make resettlement real, and fair.

    A transparent, time-bound return plan with genuine security guarantees and a published standard for what counts as a habitable home.

Women sit together on a swept floor preparing food — peeling potatoes into bowls in a lit, tended camp kitchen where rations exist.
Where ration exists One kitchen for the whole block — but lit, tended, stocked with the small dignities the worst camps lack. The misery elsewhere was not inevitable. It was allowed.

None of this is hard to fix.

Every rupee goes to the children of these camps — school, clean water, and the basic hygiene the relief system never delivered. Pick what you can carry.

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