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. 

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........

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