Future-proofing the youths of Manipur – The Sangai Express

Dr Raj Singh
Most conversations about Manipur’s youth begin with the same familiar concerns – jobs are scarce, education is weak, and conflict has disrupted everything. These are real, visible problems.
But if we pause and look a little deeper, we notice something more worrying than unemployment or broken institutions : a generation slowly losing confidence in its own possibilities. This is the quieter crisis – less dramatic than violence, less measurable than joblessness, yet far more enduring.
A Life Spent Waiting
Across Manipur, young people wait.
They wait for exams, for results, for vacancies, for peace, for someone somewhere to make a decision. Waiting has become a way of life. Over time, waiting reshapes ambition. Dreams become cautious. Risk feels dangerous. The initiative feels futile. This is not because Manipuri youth lack talent or discipline. It is because effort has too often failed to translate into outcomes.
Economist Amartya Sen reminds us that development is not just about income or infrastructure, but about capabilities – the real freedoms people have to shape their lives. By this measure, Manipur’s youth are constrained not only by economics but by “shrinking choices.”
The tragedy is not that opportunities are limited. It is that young people begin to believe this limitation is permanent.
Education Without Empowerment
Most Manipuri families still believe in education as the path forward. Parents sacrifice, children study, and degrees are earned. Yet many graduates discover that their certificates carry little value outside examination halls. Education, in too many cases, has become an exercise in endurance rather than empowerment.
Students memorize rather than question, comply rather than create. Skills that matter today – communication, digital fluency, problem-solving, teamwork – are often learned accidentally rather than deliberately.
Philosopher-educator John Dewey warned long ago that education divorced from lived experience fails both the individual and society. When learning does not connect to life, young people leave institutions qualified but unprepared.
This gap is not merely academic. It is emotional. Each failed attempt chips away at confidence.
Conflict’s Invisible Wounds
Ethnic conflict is usually discussed in terms of politics, territory, or history. Rarely do we speak of how it quietly reshapes young minds.
Conflict disrupts schooling, breaks peer networks, and replaces curiosity with caution. It teaches young people to retreat into identity for safety. Over time, identity becomes destiny, and destiny becomes narrow.
Sociologist and psychologist Martin Seligman described “learned helplessness” as a condition in which repeated setbacks convince individuals that effort no longer matters. In conflict-affected regions, this condition can spread across communities.
The cost is immense: creativity is suppressed, collaboration weakens, and the future feels like something imposed rather than created.
The World Moving Without Them
While Manipur struggles to restore normalcy, the global economy has quietly rewritten its rules. Geography matters less. Skills matter more. Work is increasingly remote, project-based, and digital.
Young people in countries no richer than Manipur – Vietnam, Rwanda, the Philippines, are selling skills globally: coding, design, care services, and content creation. They did not wait for perfect systems. They learned, adapted, and entered new markets.
The painful truth is this: Manipur’s youth are not excluded because they are incapable, but because they are under-prepared for a world they were never properly introduced to.
Lessons from Unexpected Places
After the 1994 genocide, Rwanda faced devastation deeper than Manipur’s current crisis. Yet it invested heavily in youth skills, digital literacy, and National cohesion. Today, it exports services and hosts global partnerships.
Post-war South Korea was once poorer than India. Its turnaround began not with wealth, but with disciplined investment in education, skills, and collective purpose.
These stories teach us something important: economic recovery follows human capability, not the other way around.
What Future-Proofing Really Means
Preparing young people for the future does not mean predicting which jobs will exist. It means helping them become adaptable, confident learners.
For Manipuri youth, this means nurturing:
* the habit of continuous learning
* skills that travel across industries
* emotional resilience in uncertain times
* the courage to create value, not just seek approval
These qualities are rarely taught, yet they decide who thrives when systems fail.
Shared Futures Heal Faster Than Agreements
Peace does not return simply because violence pauses. It returns when people see benefit in cooperation.
When youths from different communities learn together, work together, and build together, something subtle changes. The future becomes shared. Distrust loses its grip.
Economic interdependence has historically healed wounds that politics could not. Young people building common livelihoods weaken the logic of division more effectively than slogans ever can.
Responsibility Beyond the State
Yes, the Central Government must do more – connectivity, investment, consistency matter. But history is clear: regions that wait passively for rescue fall further behind.
Real transformation emerges when local initiative meets supportive policy. Manipur cannot afford to outsource its future entirely to distant decisions.
The Inner Shift That Matters Most
No policy can rescue a generation that has lost faith in effort. The most difficult transformation is internal: replacing resignation with curiosity, fear with experimentation, grievance with growth.
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned that suffering becomes destructive when it lacks meaning. For Manipur’s youth, restoring meaning to effort is the real work of future-proofing.
A Hope That Holds
Hope does not mean denying hardship. It means recognizing possibilities within constraints. Every Manipuri youth who acquires a globally relevant skill weakens the grip of isolation.
Every collaborative venture weakens the pull of conflict. Every act of self-learning quietly expands the horizon.
The future will not wait for Manipur. But it will not exclude it either. If this generation learns to adapt, to collaborate, and to believe again in its own agency, Manipur’s story need not be one of permanent delay. It can be a story of resilience – slow to start, perhaps, but strong enough to endure.
The future is not something to be awaited. It is something we step into – prepared, together, and with confidence.