In many parts of Nagaland, a road is not treated as a luxury. It is treated as a lifeline. This truth has been made painfully clear once again by the situation in Tsuwao and Lengnyu villages of Noklak District, where a landslide in July washed away a key stretch of the Noklak–Tsuwao–Lengnyu PWD Road. What followed was not just an inconvenience. It was a slow unravelling of everyday life.
When a road is lost, it is not only vehicles that stop moving. Access to hospitals, medicine and basic food items is lost. In Lengnyu and Tsuwao, sugar, tea, salt and soap have reportedly become difficult to find, as commercial vehicles have stopped plying and shops have been forced to shut down. Agricultural produce from the fields is now being relied upon as the main source of daily sustenance, a situation that would have been unimaginable before the disaster.
The human cost of this isolation cannot be measured only in economic terms. A tragic death has already been reported from Tsuwao village, where a mother of two is said to have passed away while waiting to travel to the district hospital, her journey reportedly prevented by a blockade. Such a loss is a stark reminder that road connectivity is directly tied to survival, not simply to convenience.
Vulnerable groups are being hit hardest. Pregnant women, elderly people and young children are placed at serious risk when the only way to reach medical help is a journey of several hours on foot. It has been reported that a mother of nine has had to walk three to four hours just to meet her children studying in the district headquarters, carrying little more than a bottle of water for the journey. Such hardship should not be treated as normal, even in a difficult terrain like Noklak’s.
Some relief has been extended. Doctors and health workers are reported to have travelled part of the way on motorcycles and the rest on foot to reach Lengnyu with medical supplies, while villagers walked out to meet them halfway. Emergency rice supplies have also been arranged by the district administration and the Department of Food and Civil Supply. These efforts deserve recognition, but they remain temporary responses to what is, in truth, a long-standing structural gap.
This episode should be read as more than a local disaster story. It is a reflection of how thin the margin for survival becomes in areas where infrastructure has not been made resilient. A stretch of road measuring only seven kilometres on the map has come to represent, for these villages, the difference between access and abandonment. Restoration work is said to be underway, and light vehicles are expected to be allowed once repairs are completed. But the larger question cannot be set aside once one road is rebuilt.
Roads across Nagaland’s hill districts must be built and maintained with an understanding that landslides are not rare exceptions but recurring realities during the monsoon. Until that understanding is reflected in planning and investment, villages like Tsuwao and Lengnyu will keep being cut off, and the cost of that isolation will continue to be counted, sometimes, in lives.
