The Village Is the Claim — India Is Building Its Northern Border and Not Counting Who Lives There

Pritiraj BrahmaFounding Partner, Pritiraj & Partners · 16 August 2026

The Vibrant Villages Programme exists to reverse outmigration from the villages along the China frontier. Four years in, the state publishes roads sanctioned, bridges approved and activities held. It does not publish how many people live in those villages.

ProvenancePublished 16 August 2026. VVP-I figures are as stated by the Ministry of Home Affairs to March 2026, covering financial years 2022-23 to 2025-26. VVP-II was launched on 20 February 2026. Frontier Highway length and cost figures are drawn from press reporting of Ministry of Road Transport and Highways sanctions and disagree materially; no consolidated official figure is published.

The Vibrant Villages Programme was approved in February 2023 with one stated purpose: to stop people leaving the villages along India’s northern border, because an empty village is a weaker claim than an inhabited one. Its published outputs are 112 roads, 35 bridges, ₹2,513.35 crore sanctioned and 2,971 activities held. Its stated objective is a population figure. That figure is not published.

China’s border strategy in the Himalaya is a settlement strategy. Villages are built, populated, connected and then cited — the presence of residents converting a cartographic assertion into an administered fact. Indian intelligence assessments reported in the press put the number of such dual-use settlements along the 3,488-kilometre Line of Actual Control at 628, established in phases since 2017. That figure is an intelligence estimate carried in reporting, not a published official count, and should be read as such.

India’s answer is the Vibrant Villages Programme. Announced in the Union Budget for 2022-23 and approved as a centrally sponsored scheme in February 2023, VVP-I carried ₹4,800 crore for the financial years 2022-23 to 2025-26, of which ₹2,500 crore was earmarked exclusively for road connectivity. It identified 2,967 villages in 46 blocks across 19 districts of Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Uttarakhand and Ladakh, of which 662 villages — including 455 in Arunachal Pradesh alone — were taken up for priority coverage in the first phase. VVP-II, launched on 20 February 2026 with an outlay of ₹6,839 crore, extends the model to seventeen states and union territories, including Manipur and the western and eastern land borders.

The programme is the right instrument. The question this essay asks is narrower and harder: how would anyone know whether it has worked?

Five findings anchor this analysis:

1. Every published metric measures the state’s activity, not the village’s population. In March 2026 the Ministry of Home Affairs stated that 112 roads and 35 long-span bridges worth ₹2,513.35 crore had been sanctioned under VVP-I, intended to connect 135 previously unconnected villages in Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Uttarakhand. Government data recorded 2,971 activities in Arunachal Pradesh under VVP-I through February 2026. Roads sanctioned, bridges approved, crore committed, activities held — four output series, none of which answers whether anybody stayed.
2. The programme’s own objective is stated as a population outcome. The Ministry of Home Affairs describes VVP as improving quality of life in identified border villages so as to encourage residents “to stay at their native locations, thereby reversing outmigration and adding to the security of the border”. Reversing outmigration is a measurable claim about resident population in named villages. There is no published baseline for the 662 priority villages and no published series since.
3. Road sanction and road completion are being reported as though they were the same event. The March 2026 statement gives roads sanctioned. Reporting on the same programme records unit costs of over ₹2 crore per kilometre and a requirement that states fit GPS-enabled tracking devices to construction machinery — which is a monitoring input, not an output. What is not stated in any of it is kilometres completed and opened to traffic, by village, by date. A village is connected when a vehicle reaches it, not when a file clears.
4. The largest single piece of frontier infrastructure has no agreed published dimensions. The Arunachal Frontier Highway, NH-913, notified as a national highway in 2018, appears in reporting variously at 1,637 km, 1,748 km and 1,840 km, and at sanctioned costs of ₹28,229 crore and ₹42,000 crore. Its route from the Tawang sector along the McMahon Line to Vijaynagar near the Myanmar border is consistently described; its size is not. We state the disagreement rather than choosing a number, because no consolidated official figure appears to be public — and a project of this scale whose length is uncertain by two hundred kilometres cannot be audited against a schedule.
5. The border-tourism component has outrun the measurement framework entirely. Thirteen Indo-China border villages across Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Sikkim were open to Indian tourists in June 2026, seven of them on Aadhaar alone following Himachal Pradesh’s June 2025 policy dispensing with the Inner Line Permit. Civilian footfall in frontier villages is a real strategic good. It is also the component most likely to be reported as success, because visitor numbers are easy to count — and visitors are precisely not the residents the programme exists to retain.

Why a settlement policy must count settlers

The strategic logic of VVP rests on a proposition about people. A populated border village supplies what no patrol can: continuous local presence, familiarity with terrain, early awareness of movement, and a civilian population whose administration is itself evidence of jurisdiction. The Ministry of Home Affairs says as much when it describes border residents as the eyes and ears of the border-guarding forces.

If that is the theory, then the programme’s key performance indicator is resident population, disaggregated to the village, measured annually, published. Everything else — road, telecom, school, health centre, solar unit, homestay — is an input purchased in the hope of moving that one number.

India already has the machinery to measure it. Village-level population is within the competence of the Registrar General, and the electoral roll, the ration card database, the school enrolment register and the health sub-centre record all carry village-level counts that move when families leave. Nothing about this measurement is technically hard. It is simply not anybody’s stated duty.

The two-ministries problem

Frontier development in India is split by instrument. The Ministry of Home Affairs runs VVP through the Department of Border Management and the state district administrations. Roads on the frontier are variously with the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, the Border Roads Organisation and state PWDs. The Ministry of Defence holds the operational requirement that justifies much of it.

Each of those bodies publishes what it does. None publishes the outcome all of them are working towards, because the outcome belongs to no single one of them. The district administration prepares village action plans for “100 per cent saturation of central and state schemes” — saturation being, once again, an input measure. It is the familiar Indian pattern: many owners of tasks, no owner of the result.

The counter-case, honestly stated

Three arguments run the other way, and the first is strong enough to give ground on.

Publishing village-level population data along a contested frontier has a genuine security cost. It tells an adversary exactly which hamlets are thinning, which is information China’s own border-village programme would find useful. There is a defensible case for holding disaggregated data close. But the answer to that is aggregation, not silence: a block-level or district-level resident-population index, published annually, would carry the accountability without handing over a map of weak points.

Second, four years is short. Roads at over ₹2 crore per kilometre through Himalayan terrain, in weather windows of a few months, are slow by physics rather than by administration; demanding population reversal by 2026 from money released between 2023 and 2026 is not serious. Fair — but a baseline should have been struck in 2023 precisely so that the judgment could be made later. The absence of a baseline is not explained by the shortness of time.

Third, the programme has been visibly adaptive. VVP-II’s expansion beyond the China frontier to seventeen states, the inclusion of Manipur and the eastern border, and the acknowledgement that border populations face trans-border crime and urban migration together, all suggest a scheme learning from its first phase. That is real, and it is more than most centrally sponsored schemes manage.

What we would do

1. Publish a resident-population index for the priority villages, annually, at block level. One table: 2023 baseline reconstructed from electoral roll and ration card data, current year, change. Block-level aggregation answers the security objection. Without this number, VVP has no success criterion at all and every subsequent claim about it is unfalsifiable.
2. Report roads completed and opened, not roads sanctioned. Kilometres open to traffic, by village, by date, against the sanctioned length. The GPS trackers already fitted to construction machinery mean the state is collecting progress data it does not publish; publish the aggregate.
3. Fix and publish one authoritative length and cost for the Frontier Highway. A national highway cannot have three lengths and two costs in circulation. One notified figure, one sanctioned figure, one package-wise completion schedule, on the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways site, updated quarterly.
4. Separate the tourism metric from the retention metric, formally. Report visitor footfall and resident population as two different series in the same statement, so that the easier number cannot stand in for the harder one. Border tourism is a livelihood instrument; it is not evidence that anyone stayed.
5. Name one accountable authority for the outcome. A single officer — at the Department of Border Management, reporting to the Empowered Committee on Border Infrastructure — answerable not for scheme saturation but for the resident-population trend in the priority villages, with a quarterly note on villages still losing people and what is being done about them. A settlement policy needs a custodian of settlement.

China builds a village and then cites its residents. India builds a road and cites the sanction. Both states are making a claim about who lives on a frontier. Only one of them is keeping count.

Companion essay: Fifty-Eight Thousand, Eight Hundred and Eighty-One — the same frontier approached through a different instrument.