By – Amar Yumnam
The present Head of the People of Manipur began with lots of hope, trust and expectations from the people. His initiative of appointing Advisors strengthened this hope. But by now people see this step as just pretensions to cause the people feel like his seriousness. Anyway from midnight of last night till the morning of 10 March 2026, I have been indulging myself to appreciate his Budget. Let me begin why my endeavour in this:
A. Budget is a serious Document relating to how the government is trying to enhance the well-being of the people in the forthcoming period of April to March of the next year..
B. Budget is an important document for the persons who tries to understand how the Government intends to put emphasis and direction of actions.
C. This being the case, the interested persons would certainly look into the Ministry of Finance website in the case of the Union Budget and that of the Department of Finance in case of the States.
D. The documents are supposed to be available immediately after the presentation in the Parliament or the State Assembly. In the case of the Union Budget, the documents are available immediately after the Budget Speech gets over and the Minister announces the presentation of the Budget to the House.
Expecting a similar character, I opened the website of the Department of Finance of the Government of Manipur immediately after midnight of 9 March 2026. It may be my stupidity that I have yet to find any document in relation to the budget of 2026-2027 of Manipur at that time. In a table titled Budget, I found in column 13 (last column) an entry titled BUDGET SPEECH (Manipuri) for the year “20222-2023”. Since it could mean a Speech delivered twenty-thousand years back or to be delivered twenty thousand years later, I could not take any venture to look further into it. But there is no information in the entire website except the circulars made earlier to the various departments and which could relate to be preparation of the current Budget.
I took particular interest in the latest Budget since the Finance Minister (the Head of the People in this case) had made an announcement for payment of a lump-sum amount to the women affected by the turmoil of the last three years; this definitely could have lots of implications as to what the government has in mind for further addressing the present grievances and the anticipated worries. One may ask me why particular interest in this? First, such payments are not meant for temporary entertainment but only as a foundation for further interventions for permanent rehabilitation of the affected people, not just the women. Second, the chaos has affected not just the women, but the families as a whole and particularly including children. Third, such interventions should necessarily be based on a conscious and serious survey of the people adversely affected by the pandemonium. Fourth, there could be necessarily families with no woman member. The government interventions for betterment should not leave such families in a community-wide involvement of chaos costing lives without discrimination. Fifth, if the policy is only to give a certain amount to women adversely affected by the social crisis, it cannot be a random intervention.
These are some of the issues on which I wanted to learn from the documents of the Budget. But unfortunately, it looks like that these are not meant for the general public but only for limited individuals. I can say with confidence that presentation of the Budget and making the related Documents widely available – including putting them up in the related website of the government – is not to be taken lightly. It has a close relationship with the functioning of a democratic system. Where is the Department of Finance of the Government of Manipur in this connection? There cannot be a holistic understanding of any Budget from the reports provided by the newspapers or news of the TV channels.