The road from Tuensang to Noklak does not welcome visitors. It climbs through the Naga hills in lurches and switchbacks, narrowing where it should widen, washing out where it should hold. In the wet months, it becomes more of a suggestion than a road. In the dry months, it is merely the kind of drive that makes you think about turning back.
Vikuonuo Sachü drives it anyway.
She is in her mid-twenties, the daughter of a Kohima family, and a former Miss Nagaland — which, in the social geography of the Northeast, is not a small thing. She reached the national stage at Femina Miss India.
She had, by any reasonable assessment, options. The modelling circuit. A city apartment. A career built on the currency of visibility that beauty competitions dispense to their winners. Instead, she is here, in Noklak, one of the newest and most remote districts in India, pressed against the Myanmar border, running a children’s learning centre in a building near the High School Sector B of town.
Most days, she is the first one in.
Nagaland’s frontier districts do not appear often in the national press, except when they are useful — as waypoints in the government’s Act East narrative, as sites of infrastructure photographs, as proof that the state reaches this far.
The Khiamniungan Naga people, who have lived in these hills across what is now an international boundary for longer than the boundary has existed, occupy a specific kind of political invisibility: present in strategic documents, absent from the conversations those documents are meant to serve.
Sachü won the Miss Nagaland crown in December 2019, at eighteen, while still in Class 12. The pandemic stretched her reign across two years rather than one — she has described this not as bad luck but as more time to use what she’d been given. She toured all twelve districts of the state.
She went to the ones people don’t tour voluntarily: the poor ones, the far ones, the districts where secondary school graduates have never touched a keyboard. She saw what was there. She also saw what wasn’t.
In 2022, she registered Miraculum Society Nagaland, a charitable organisation. The name is Latin for miracle. The motto is simpler: Purpose to Nurture and Build.
She chose Noklak for the work — Noklak, which had only become its own administrative district in 2021, carved from the larger Tuensang district as a matter of state reorganisation, still building the institutional skeleton that other districts had accumulated over decades. She has said she chose it because the need was real and because the people were ready. Listening to her, you believe both things.
The Creative Children’s Friendship Centre opened formally in July 2023. What it offers sounds modest in enumeration: a library, free coaching for students facing the Class 10 and 12 board examinations, computer training, skills workshops, sessions on menstrual health, art and music, and what the centre calls peace-building programmes — the last of which carries a specific gravity in a border district living in the aftermath of the Free Movement Regime’s suspension and the slow turbulence arriving from across the Myanmar border.
More than 150 children come through regularly, supported in part by a crowdfunding effort Sachü calls the 100s Angels campaign and by Sunbird Trust, a development organisation that provides core funding. Community contributions — money, labour, the ordinary generosity of people who believe the person asking for it — do the rest.
By the centre’s first anniversary, an art gallery had opened inside it, hung with work by Khiamniungan artists. A community publication called “Know About Us” had been produced. Both are, in their quiet way, acts of assertion.
The Khiamniungan are a people whose cultural world the new border fencing threatens to bisect — whose kinship networks, whose ceremonial lives, whose sense of wholeness extend into Myanmar in ways that New Delhi’s recent policies have begun to cut. To make their art visible, to document their own account of themselves, is to insist on a continuity that official maps do not recognise.
She has since extended the work outward. A women’s skills centre, called Jayant, operates now in Choklangan, a village that sits close enough to the border that the distinction between here and there sometimes feels administrative rather than real. Scholarship programs have been established. The structure of something durable is being laid, grant by grant, term by term.
The road, the distance, the particular difficulty of building anything in a place the state reaches last — none of this is lost on Sachü.
She splits her time between Kohima and Noklak, the city she is from and the district she has chosen, and the distance between them is more than geographical. In Kohima, there are restaurants and offices, and the familiar friction of a place that knows it is being watched. In Noklak, there is the work itself, unmediated.
People who know the centre describe something harder to quantify than a curriculum: a shift in what the children there believe is possible for them. That is the thing that roads, check posts, and connectivity initiatives cannot build on their own.
The government constructs infrastructure on timelines measured in decades; it cannot construct the interior conditions that make infrastructure useful. A child who has learned to read critically, to use a computer, to think of her own knowledge as something worth developing — that child is ready for the future that the Act East Policy promises, rather than merely subject to it.
Vikuonuo Sachü won a beauty pageant and could have ended her efforts there. She didn’t. In a small building in the hills above the Myanmar border, in a district that most of the country cannot locate on a map, she is doing the work that does not photograph easily, does not resolve quickly and does not stop.
The children keep coming. That is, for now, enough.
Miraculum Society Nagaland accepts support through the 100s Angels campaign.
Also Read: Into the Rhododendron Kingdom: Climbing Mount Saramati, Part II
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