Imphal, May 17: One unending question that has been haunting the collective psyche of the thinking people of Manipur is the poser, Should there be development for peace to come or should there be peace for development to come? This was the question that occupied the minds of a number of senior journalists who conducted a rural development study on the villages lying in the South Eastern part of Manipur way beyond Hengshi village, where the Indian Army or rather the Assam Rifles has its last post.

There is no easy answer to the question posed before but the seeming lack of any development in the border areas of Manipur was palpable as the media team visited villages after villages.At Hengshi village where the Assam Rifles has its last post, the complaints were many, despite the seeming reign of peace, thanks to the presence of the security personnel.

A nondescript village with 23 households, Hengshi fits the description of a village where everything has gone wrong.

There is one primary school with 50 students in this village with four teachers.

Sounds impressive, but the irony of the situation became clear when some of the villagers confided that of the four teachers, two are appointed by the villagers to teach the students.

Acute shortage of water is a perennial problem in all the villages that the media team visited.

The people of Hengshi have to go to either Chakpikarong or Sugnu to avail medical treatment by foot and children are known to have fallen victim to such common diseases as dysentery and typhoid, according to the villagers.

The same story goes for Senlon which was once a prosperous village.

The Government may have gone in for a media blitzkrieg to highlight rural development programmes such as the food for work programme under the SGSY scheme but the ground reality tells a different story.

With no other alternative many of the villagers are being forced to go in for poppy cultivation which fetches a tidy sum in the market across the border.

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