The 100-km ‘people’s road’ an IAS officer built with facebook donations
Tamenglong, Manipur: For decades, the sick in Tousem, a cluster of hamlets in Manipur’s Tamenglong district, were carried to hospital on bamboo stretchers. There was no road wide enough for a vehicle, and villagers had to wade across a river and then walk five hours to reach the nearest town.
The 100-km Tamenglong-Haflong link meant to connect Tousem to Manipur, Assam and Nagaland had been sanctioned in the Sixth Five Year Plan in the early 1980s. Public works crews laid some stretches, the Border Roads Organisation declined the rest in 1997 over faulty alignment, and ministerial visits in 2006 and 2011 brought only assurances.
In 2012, Armstrong Pame, a 28-year-old IAS officer of the 2009 batch and the first IAS officer from the Zeme Naga community, was posted as Sub-Divisional Magistrate of Tousem. When he formally sought funds for the missing stretch, the state government turned him down for lack of resources.
Pame then used his own savings and Facebook. He put in Rs 5 lakh, his brother, a Delhi University teacher, added Rs 1 lakh, and his mother contributed a month of his father’s pension. He opened a Facebook page appealing for help. Donations poured in.
A stranger in the US pledged $2,500 overnight, a Sikh man in New York sent $3,000. Collection points came up in Delhi, Pune, Bengaluru, Chennai, Guwahati, Shillong and Dimapur, with contributions also from the diaspora in Canada, the US and UK. About Rs 40 lakh was raised.
The amount was enough to hire bulldozers and earthmovers, but not labour. That came free.Around 250 villagers, more than 100 of them women, turned up with spades when construction began in August 2012. “It is our road, we are doing it with you, Sir,” one told him.
Work paused for the monsoon and resumed weeks later, with villagers clearing thickets with machetes and daos and providing fuel, food and lodging for crews.
The road was completed in seven months and inaugurated on February 17, 2013, at Katangnam village, where a monolith now lists every contributor. It came to be known as the People’s Road, and Pame as the ‘Miracle Man’ of Manipur.
Pame was later nominated for CNN-IBN Indian of the Year in public service, invited to Facebook headquarters in California, and conferred India’s Most Eminent IAS Officer Award in 2015. He went on to serve as Director in the Department of School Education and Literacy and Joint Secretary in the Union Ministry of Higher Education before being repatriated to the Manipur cadre in May 2026.
