DA Editorial Desk | Dhruba Deka
Some stories do not need statistics to make their point. This week, in Naljala village near Bishramganj in Sepahijala district, residents carried the body of a 70-year-old man on their shoulders to the cemetery — because the road connecting Naljala to Jotatali remains, according to villagers, in the same broken condition it has been in for years, never properly brick-paved or adequately repaired in the nearly eighty years since Independence. There was no vehicle to bear the coffin because no vehicle could reasonably make that journey. A funeral, already among the hardest moments a family endures, became a physical ordeal on top of a grieving one.
It would be easy to treat this as an isolated tragedy, and in one sense it is — this particular family, on this particular day, bore a burden no family should have to. But villagers speaking to local media were clear that this was not a one-off hardship. They described the poor road as a persistent barrier to healthcare, education and employment access, not merely an inconvenience that surfaces during funerals. A road bad enough to force pallbearers to carry a coffin on foot is also, on any ordinary day, bad enough to delay an ambulance, discourage a teacher from taking up a rural posting, or make the daily commute to school or work exhausting enough that people simply stop trying. The funeral is the moment this story became visible. The underlying condition it exposed has presumably been there, unseen by anyone outside the village, for a very long time.
This is where an editorial has to resist two equally unhelpful impulses. The first is outrage without follow-through — a burst of sympathy for Naljala this week, forgotten by the next news cycle, with the road exactly as broken a year from now. The second is treating this as simply another entry in the long, familiar genre of “neglected village” stories that Indian journalism produces regularly, filed and moved past without asking why the neglect persists. Both responses let the underlying problem off too easily.
The villagers’ own request is modest and specific: that the Chief Minister take the necessary steps to see the Naljala-Jotatali route properly constructed or repaired. As of this writing, there has been no official response to that appeal. That silence deserves to be named plainly, because it is itself part of the problem this story illustrates. A request this narrow — one stretch of rural road, one clearly identified fix — should not require a funeral to reach the desk of someone who can act on it, and should not sit unanswered once it has.
There is a broader pattern worth naming too. Sepahijala is not one of Tripura’s most remote or inaccessible districts; Bishramganj itself sits roughly 35 kilometres from Agartala, close enough that this is not a story about the impossible logistics of reaching the state’s farthest hill tracts. If a village this close to the capital can go decades without a properly paved connecting road, the implications for genuinely remote villages, further from any district headquarters, are sobering. Naljala’s road is not an extreme case. It may, in fact, be closer to the median condition of rural connectivity than the state’s development narratives tend to acknowledge.
Tripura’s government has, in recent months, announced ambitious infrastructure commitments — smart border fencing pilots, a proposed cricket academy on 30 acres at Sekerkote, an international cricket stadium at Narsingarh. None of these projects are wrong to pursue, and a state is entitled to invest in sport, security and symbols of progress alongside basic infrastructure. But a government’s priorities are legible in what gets funded quickly and what waits decades, and a single unpaved connecting road serving a functioning village, for the better part of a century, sits uncomfortably alongside cricket academies moving from announcement to allocation within a news cycle.
What should happen now is straightforward, even if it has proven elusive for eighty years. The Sepahijala district administration should conduct and publish a rapid assessment of the Naljala-Jotatali road’s condition and the cost of proper repair. The state government should commit to a specific timeline for that work, not a general assurance. And this newspaper, along with others covering Tripura’s rural development, should return to this story in six months — not to reopen old grief, but to check whether Naljala’s road has actually changed, or whether the village’s moment of visibility has already faded back into the silence it emerged from. A community should not have to bury its dead on foot to be noticed. It should not have to do so twice.