On a March morning in 2023, people began gathering along the banks of the Tuitha river near the Lajangphai–Thingchom bridge in Lamka, Churachandpur district, Manipur.
Church elders, youth volunteers, women’s groups, village authorities, and government officials stood side by side, looking down at a river that had once been central to daily life. Children used to swim here. Women washed clothes and collected water. Now plastic bottles, nappies, and other waste floated in the shallows, and the water carried the smell of sewage.
These people had come to mark the International Day of Action for Rivers and to launch a new initiative with an old name: lawmlawm. The gathering opened with a prayer and a Bible reading on creation.
Songs followed, including “Heal the World,” sung by a local artist. Speeches stressed that rivers are more than channels of water; they are lifelines, holding memories of how people once lived in harmony with the land, forest, and rain.
Lamka’s story is not unique. Across the Indian Himalayan Region, rapid and often unplanned development is putting intense pressure on land, water, and forests. But 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
Lamka is one of Manipur’s fastest-growing towns. Hillsides once covered in forest now bear the marks of quarries, roads, brick kilns, and scattered construction. As trees disappear, bare slopes send mud and solid waste into streams with every heavy rain. Groundwater levels have fallen, and springs that older residents remember as reliable all year round now run dry for months.
The town’s waste problem has deepened these pressures. As restaurants, markets, and small industries multiply, they generate more solid waste than the existing system can collect or treat.
In Churachandpur 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, roadside corners, and riverbanks. Markets such as New Bazaar and Lamka Bazaar are ringed with heaps of mixed waste. Plastic bags, food scraps, discarded clothes, glass, and electronic waste collect in low-lying areas. During the monsoon, these piles are washed into nearby streams and rivers. Instead of carrying clear water, the Lanva River and Tuitha River now transport bottles, wrappers, and sewage.
“The Tuitha used to be where our children learned to swim,” said a resident of Hiangzou neighbourhood. “Now we tell them not to go near it after the rains because the water smells and brings rubbish right up to our doorstep.”
This pollution has direct consequences for health. When drains clog, stagnant water becomes a breeding ground for mosquitoes that spread malaria and other diseases. Children play near open dumping sites.
Residents who live downstream or in low-income neighbourhoods have fewer options for safe water. Communities that once saw rivers as sources of life are now forced to treat them as open sewers.
At the same time, climate-related risks are becoming more visible. Unpredictable rainfall, short but intense downpours, and longer dry spells add further strain to damaged catchments and degraded waterways. In this setting, local efforts to restore rivers and green spaces are not only about aesthetics. They are about resilience, health, and dignity.
The meaning of lawmlawm
Against this backdrop, the Rural Women Upliftment Society (RWUS) and Highland Impact Foundation began asking a simple but difficult question: how can people in Lamka reclaim their rivers and green spaces instead of watching them disappear?
Both organisations have worked with grassroots communities for years on issues ranging from food security and women’s leadership to climate change and natural resource management. 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 dialects, lawmlawm is a word used when something becomes “too much”. It expresses both affection and unease. It is used for an excess of love, pride, grief, or pressure. In Lamka today, many residents use it to describe what is happening around them. Too much sewage in the drains.
Too much plastic and waste in the rivers. Too many bald slopes where forests once stood. Too much indifference in the face of environmental decline.
The initiative takes this sense of “too much” and turns it into a call to act. Lawmlawm focuses on four connected areas: 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 specialised issue for experts but as the heart of a wider effort to reclaim public spaces, improve health, and build a more hopeful future for the town’s residents.
Women and young people are at the forefront. They organise meetings, speak at churches and colleges, lead clean-up drives, and coordinate with local authorities. In doing so, they show that environmental leadership can come from everyday life, not only from policy platforms and technical reports.
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 in February 2023, brought together 45 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 this same river had become a dumping site and how its water was no longer safe for drinking or bathing.
During the workshop, participants shared traditional knowledge about how earlier generations managed rivers and land. They spoke about the role of riparian vegetation in holding soil and providing shade, community rules on fishing and sand extraction, and customary ways of preventing waste from entering streams.
They also discussed changes: the decline of collective rules, the growth of unregulated sand mining, and the spread of disposable products such as nappies and plastic bottles.
By the end of the workshop, participants had outlined a roadmap for action. They agreed to form Protection Committees with village authorities to watch over local rivers and streams.
They proposed practical steps such as village-level awareness programmes, regular cleaning drives along riverbanks, and the targeted removal of high-impact pollutants.
Another workshop, held the following day, focused on traditional resource management. Forty-six participants from different communities came together to discuss how indigenous practices can guide the protection of land, forests, and water. Particular attention was given to the role of young women.
The discussions explored how they could participate more actively in decisions about land use and how their knowledge and labour could support more sustainable resource management.
According to participants, these gatherings did more than pass on information. They helped rebuild confidence that local knowledge still matters and that communities are not powerless.
They also laid the foundation for stronger collaboration between village authorities, community-based organisations, and government departments. For many participants, it was also the first time village chiefs, women leaders, and youth sat together to speak only about rivers, forests, and land.
“We realised that each of us holds a small part of the solution,” one woman participant said. “When we put our ideas together, it became easier to see what we can do in our own villages.”