By Napoleon S Mawphniang
There’s a particular kind of cruelty — quiet, bureaucratic, almost elegant in its indifference — that doesn’t announce itself with the blunt instrument of a bad law or the loud violence of a riot. It reveals itself instead in the architecture of a government scheme. A scheme wrapped in the language of promise. Dressed in the vocabulary of progress. Yet constructed in such a way that when it collapses, it’s always the farmer who stands beneath the rubble. Not the bureaucrat who signed the file. Not the department head who attended the launch ceremony. The farmer.
I think about this often. I think about it because I’ve met them — pig farmers from various villages of Meghalaya that never make it into press releases. People who looked at the Meghalaya Piggery Mission loan — roughly Rs 15 to 20 lakhs disbursed through the Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Department via the Meghalaya Livestock Enterprises Advancement Society, or M-LEADS — and saw, for the first time in a long while, a door opening. When the Federation of Piggery Farmers of Meghalaya ( FPFM) – I’ve been working with was formally established on March 21, 2026, bringing together nearly 400 affected farmers and 25 cooperative societies, the stories we began collecting were not easy to carry.
So let me begin with a question — and I ask it in the spirit of Socrates, not as a rhetorical flourish, but as a genuine demand for clarity: what does the word “mission” actually mean? Wittgenstein would press us here. He’d insist we look at the word not in abstract isolation but in the language-game in which it is being played. A “mission” implies purpose, accountability, follow-through. But what accountability exists when the Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Department’s official webpage hasn’t been substantively updated since January 2018? As one documented analysis bluntly recorded, we face an “accountability void” — seven years of silence where public data on the Piggery Mission’s outcomes ought to be. Seven years. No annual progress reports. No production data. Nothing to show.
The mission was conceived with great ambition. Launched in FY 2021 and funded by the National Cooperative Development Corporation (NCDC), the Piggery Mission document—still available on megahvt.gov.in—describes plans for 2,513 nuclear breeding units, 21,359 fattening units, and 23 state-of-the-art slaughterhouses, with one for every two blocks in the state. Reading it feels like examining a manifesto for a revolution that was never organized. It’s reminiscent of Prometheus bringing fire, but no one has built the altar to ensure its safe use.
In 2022 and 2023, hundreds of farmers from cooperative societies enrolled under this mission borrowed between Rs 15 lakh and Rs 20 lakh. They signed papers, purchased stock, and made plans. Then, the African Swine Fever (ASF) struck. It is important to understand the severity of ASF; it is a hemorrhagic viral disease for which there is no treatment and no vaccine, as explicitly stated in the advisory from the Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Department. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) confirmed multiple resurgences of the outbreak across Meghalaya in 2026, with Ri Bhoi being one of the most severely affected districts. Between 2022 and 2023, the disease devastated pig herds across Northeast India, resulting in what researchers from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) later characterized as “disproportionate losses for smallholder and tribal farmers.” Pigs died, and the investments vanished overnight.
Here is where Kafka enters the room. Because what followed is something only bureaucratic nightmare can produce. The pigs were gone. The livelihood was gone. But the loan wasn’t. Banks — doing precisely what banks are structurally designed to do — began knocking on doors. The mission document had promised zero-percent interest, but only within a fixed repayment window; cross that window and interest begins accumulating automatically. Farmers with no pigs and no income were now facing compounding debt. Speaking to the press in Shillong in May 2026, I described it this way: “Many thought that the loan was a blessing but when African swine flu hit, many of them were victims of the loan itself. The pigs are gone and the banks are knocking on the door demanding from them to pay back the loan.” (Meghalaya Daily, May 26, 2026). Some went into depression. That’s not a metaphor. That’s a clinical reality.
So where was the Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Department when ASF was tearing through these farms? The department’s own documentation concedes that veterinary manpower is “much less than required,” that diagnostic facilities “need strengthening,” that vaccine quality control is inadequate, and quarantine infrastructure remains weak. The department said this to itself, in its own reports. Knowing all of this — knowing there was neither treatment nor vaccine for ASF, knowing their veterinary capacity was threadbare — why did they disburse loans to cooperative farmers and call it a mission? That question deserves not a press conference but a public reckoning.
This situation exemplifies the Freirean trap in its most precise form. Isn’t this exactly what we are witnessing? The Piggery Mission didn’t empower the farmers; it instead indebted them. It provided them with a semblance of enterprise without supplying the essential infrastructure needed for success—namely, disease prevention, a veterinary safety net, and market protections—that would make their enterprises viable.
Additionally, there’s the market problem, which is nearly as detrimental as the issue of disease. Our federation’s memorandum, submitted in May 2026 to Governor C.H. Vijayashankar, Chief Minister Conrad K. Sangma, and Animal Husbandry Minister Sanbor Shullai, has documented what local farmers have been saying for years: the unregulated influx of pigs from Assam, Punjab, and Delhi is driving down local prices.. A Meghalaya-raised pig takes one-and-a-half years to reach market weight. A commercially bred pig from outside takes four to six months. The economics are brutal. Local farmers simply cannot compete. And yet no border regulation exists. No “Buy Meghalaya Pork” policy. Nothing resembling a serious protective response. Chomsky called this manufactured consent — the engineering of conditions that appear normal while systematically favouring entrenched interests over the vulnerable.
The so-called “insurance” built into the mission? Farmers tell me it wasn’t real insurance. It was a contribution extracted from their own pockets, and it didn’t cover ASF losses. Not a single rupee in compensation has been paid by the government for pig deaths caused by African Swine Fever, as confirmed by the federation’s representations. The Shillong Times reported on the federation’s demands in May 2026, yet formal government compensation notifications remain conspicuously absent.
Ambedkar — who understood better than almost anyone what debt does to a community — wrote that economic bondage was inseparable from social subjugation. He’d have recognised this story immediately. In Greek myth, Tantalus stood in a pool beneath heavy fruit trees, both water and fruit eternally receding at the moment of reach. That’s not drama. That’s a precise description of what the Piggery Mission has been for its beneficiaries: the promise always visible, the substance — veterinary infrastructure, market protection, genuine insurance, compensatory relief — always just out of reach.
The Federation has requested a complete waiver of all Piggery Mission loans, a non-refundable relief grant of ₹10 lakh for each affected farmer, and the implementation of a “Buy Meghalaya Pork” policy. When we met with Animal Husbandry Minister Sanbor Shullai in May 2026, he assured us that the matter would be discussed the following month. However, we shall see if that happens. In Indian governance, “next month” often seems to last indefinitely. After all, the Livestock Mission webpage has been pending since 2018.
René Girard wrote of the scapegoat — the structural mechanism through which a community deflects its own failures onto its most vulnerable member. In this story, the pig farmer is the scapegoat. They carried the risk. They signed the papers. They buried the pigs. They now carry the debt. The Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Department of Meghalaya must answer — not in the language of another beautifully written mission document, but in the currency of actual relief, actual accountability, and actual justice. Not next month. Now.
(The writer is an Advocate and a concerned citizen from Ri Bhoi District, Meghalaya. He serves as Secretary of the Federation of Piggery Farmers of Meghalaya and writes in his personal capacity.)
