Lamka, a fast-growing town in Manipur’s Churachandpur district, stands at a crossroads. Hills that once held dense forest are now marked by quarries, roads and scattered construction.
Streams that children once used for bathing and drinking carry plastic, sewage and silt. The same growth that has brought new markets, shops and roads has also pushed the town’s environment close to breaking point.
This story from Lamka is not unique. Across the Indian Himalayan Region, rapid and often unplanned development is putting intense pressure on land, water and forests.
Yet Lamka also shows how communities, especially women and young people, are beginning to organise themselves to protect rivers and green spaces, using local knowledge and simple Nature-based Solutions.
A town under environmental stress
In recent years, deforestation around Lamka has accelerated. Hillsides are cleared for new buildings, quarries and roads. Where forests once held soil and water, bare slopes now send mud and rubbish into streams during heavy rain.
Traditional practices such as jhum cultivation continue in some areas, but there is little support to help farmers move towards more sustainable land use. Groundwater levels are falling, and village springs that older residents remember as reliable are now seasonal or dry.
The town’s waste problem has deepened this stress. As restaurants, workshops and bazaars multiply, they produce more solid waste than local systems can handle. Across the district, rural areas generate about 450 grams of waste per person per day, while urban residents generate about 650 grams.
Together, this amounts to an estimated 162 tonnes of waste a year, a figure projected to rise to almost 300 tonnes in the coming years if current population growth and consumption trends continue.
Much of this waste ends up in open dumps, drains and riverbanks. Markets such as New Bazaar and Lamka Bazaar are ringed with heaps of mixed waste.
Plastic bags, food scraps, discarded clothes and electronic waste gather in low-lying corners. During the monsoon, these piles wash into the streams and rivers that run through the town. Instead of carrying clear water, the Lanva river and Tuitha river now transport bottles, wrappers and sewage.
This pollution is not just a visual problem. When drains clog, stagnant water becomes a breeding ground for mosquitoes that spread malaria and other diseases. Children play near dumping sites. Residents downstream have fewer options for safe water. The town’s rivers, once central to daily life and spiritual imagination, are now treated as convenient channels for waste.
Women and youth step forward
Against this backdrop, the Rural Women Upliftment Society (RWUS) and Highland Impact Foundation began asking how local people could reclaim their rivers and green spaces instead of watching them disappear. Both organisations have long worked with grassroots communities on issues such as food security, gender justice, youth engagement and environment. Building on this experience, they launched lawmlawm, a community-driven, women-led initiative to reclaim, revive and restore green spaces in and around Lamka.
In many Zo languages, lawmlawm is a word used when something becomes “too much”. It captures both exasperation and care. Too much sewage in the drains. Too much plastic in the rivers. Too many barren slopes on the hills around the town. The name is a reminder that the present situation has crossed a line and that the community needs to respond.
Lawmlawm focuses on four simple but powerful entry points: awareness, knowledge building and documentation, capacity building, and practical action such as tree planting and clean-ups. Water bodies sit at the centre of this work. The initiative treats the protection of rivers and streams not as a separate environmental task, but as the heart of a broader effort to reclaim public spaces, improve health and build more hopeful futures for the town’s residents.
Women and young people are at the forefront of this effort. They organise meetings, speak in churches and schools, lead clean-up drives and coordinate with local authorities. In doing so, they model environmental leadership that is rooted in everyday life rather than high-level policy debates.
Listening to rivers, learning from communities
A first step in lawmlawm was to create spaces where people could speak openly about what is happening to their rivers. A workshop on the protection of rivers and streams, held at the RWUS training hall, brought together participants from 16 villages across the Tuitha valley. Many had grown up fetching water from the Tuitha River and its tributaries. They now described how the same river had become a dumping site, and how its water was no longer safe for drinking.
During the workshop, participants shared traditional knowledge about how earlier generations managed rivers and land. They spoke about the role of riparian vegetation, community rules on fishing and sand extraction, and customary ways of preventing waste from entering streams. Together, they agreed to form Protection Committees with village authorities. They proposed practical steps such as village-level awareness programmes, regular clean-up days and targeted removal of pollutants such as disposable nappies and plastic bottles.
Another strand of work focused on traditional resource management more broadly. A separate workshop invited participants from different communities to reflect on how indigenous practices can guide the protection of land, forests and water. Young women took a central role in these discussions. They explored how they could participate more actively in decisions about land use, and how their knowledge and labour could support more sustainable resource management.
These gatherings did more than share information. They rebuilt confidence that local knowledge still matters. They also laid the foundation for stronger collaboration between village authorities, community-based organisations and government departments.
From meetings to action
Lawmlawm has also moved from meetings to visible action in public spaces. In August 2023, as violence in Manipur displaced thousands of people into relief camps, RWUS, Highland Impact, and student bodies organised a mass cleaning drive. Volunteers visited camps, market areas and other public sites where waste had accumulated around living spaces and along roadsides. With support from the Churachandpur Autonomous District Council, they used trucks and equipment to remove waste and install disposal bins. In one week, the drive covered more than 15 relief camps and several key public grounds.
Clean-up activities are linked directly to awareness sessions on waste segregation and basic sanitation. In some relief centres, residents formed sanitation committees, introduced separate bins for biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste and launched friendly competitions to identify the cleanest camp. These steps helped restore a sense of dignity and control in difficult living conditions, while also reducing health risks.
Faith communities have emerged as another important partner. On Environment Sunday, observed in 16 churches across Lamka, local pastors used sermons to link care for creation with Christian responsibility. They reminded congregations that natural resources are finite, and that protecting rivers, forests and soil is part of their role as stewards of God’s creation. For many, this was the first time environmental issues had been brought so clearly into worship.
These actions, though modest, reflect simple Nature-based Solutions: restoring tree cover along streams, removing solid waste from riverbanks and managing waste at source through segregation and local rules.
Healthier rivers and restored vegetation also improve resilience to climate-related risks, by reducing erosion, flooding and contamination during heavy rain. They show how communities can work with, rather than against, natural systems to improve well-being.
Small signs of hope
These efforts do not yet solve Lamka’s environmental problems. Forests continue to shrink, and the town still lacks a strong waste management system. However, there are clear signs that the public conversation is changing.
Through lawmlawm, communities are documenting environmental changes more systematically. They note where streams have dried, where forests have thinned and where landslides have become more frequent.
Schools, colleges, churches, civil servants and civil society organisations are engaging in new ways with green spaces and water bodies. Clean-up drives at relief camps and in market areas show that coordinated action is possible even in times of conflict and uncertainty.
Women and young people from Indigenous communities are claiming their role as environmental defenders.
They use their knowledge, networks and moral authority to challenge the normalisation of pollution and neglect. They also build alliances with local government and media to advocate for stronger regulation of activities such as sand mining and waste dumping.
Towards a greener, healthier Lamka
Lamka’s experience speaks to a wider reality in many small towns across the Indian Himalayan Region.
Rapid growth without adequate planning can turn rivers into drains and hills into bare ground within a generation. Yet the same communities that bear the costs of this change also hold the ideas and energy needed to reverse it.
Lawmlawm shows how a local initiative, led by women and youth and grounded in Indigenous knowledge, can begin to shift both practice and mindset.
By pairing clean-ups with awareness and workshops with concrete follow-up, the initiative turns concern into organised action. The work is still at an early stage, but it offers a practical pathway for reclaiming rivers and green spaces in Lamka, and for inspiring similar efforts elsewhere.
As the town looks ahead, the challenge will be to deepen these community efforts, strengthen partnerships with authorities and embed environmental care in everyday decisions.
If that happens, the Tuitha River and Lanva River may yet move from being symbols of neglect to signs of a town that chose to remember and restore its living waters.
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