Deputy Labour Commissioner Probes Termination of Private Company Staff Amid Manipur Violence

The Deputy Labour Commissioner, Manipur, has issued formal notices to two private companies, Indus Towers Limited and Innovsource Services Private Limited, seeking detailed explanations over the alleged termination of Technician Khoisnam Sudhir Singh amid the ongoing ethnic conflict.

In identical letters dated November 12 (File No. LAB/396/2025(ID)), Deputy Labour Commissioner Tanushree Naorem forwarded a complaint filed by Sudhir on August 19 through the CPGRAMS portal. The grievance, routed via the Deputy Chief Labour Commissioner (Central), Guwahati, on August 21, highlights termination without due process for a worker displaced by violence.The companies have been directed to submit responses "at the earliest" to enable further action.

A parallel communication has been sent to the Joint Secretary, Home Department, Government of Manipur, requesting urgent comments on the matter, highlighting state authorities to resolve conflict-linked labour grievances and the law and order situation which compounded the pain of private company staffs. 

The Manipur violence that erupted on May 3, 2023, has devoured livelihoods across private sectors, leaving a trail of silent victims whose stories rarely breach the headlines. Telecom technicians scaling mobile towers and banking staff maintaining ATMs—predominantly Meitei employees stationed in Kuki-dominated districts such as Churachandpur, Kangpokpi, Tengnoupal, Senapati, Ukhrul, and Noney—found their careers severed overnight, roads to work transformed into forbidden frontiers.

Khoisnam Sudhir, a dedicated Technician USOF with Indus Towers Limited in Senapati, embodies this hidden injustice: terminated without recourse, his plight mirrors countless others abandoned by employers amid the chaos. Yet hope flickers through the intervention of Deputy Labour Commissioner Tanushree Naorem, whose probing letters to the companies and pointed correspondence with the Joint Secretary, Home Department, Government of Manipur, lay bare the law-and-order vacuum that has condemned these private company staffs to unemployment and despair.

On November 9, 2025—a Sunday when the corridors of power in Imphal usually echo only with silence—the Deputy Labour Commissioner flung open the Secretariat doors and summoned Sudhir Singh not as another grievance file but as a father whose sky had fallen. Tanushree Naorem, the young Deputy Labour Commissioner sat with him eye to eye, absorbing the tremor in his voice as he laid out medical reports of panic attacks, overdue school-van slips, and the burn scars his seven-year-old daughter now traces instead of fairy tales. 

Within three days, on November 12, she dispatched three letters under File No. LAB/396/2025(ID)—each a bolt of lightning against bureaucratic inertia. One landed in Guwahati at Indus Towers Limited. Another reached Innovsource Services Private Limited in Mumbai. And one—deliberately pointed—went to the Joint Secretary, Home Department, Government of Manipur, because law-and-order failure is the root that must be yanked out.

The chilling relieving letter Innovsource had issued on April 22, 2025—five months after Sudhir’s last working day on November 6, 2024 need probes. That corporate missive had the gall to praise him as “sincere, hardworking and diligent” for three full years, from November 1, 2021, only to end with the clinical line: relieved after working hours of 06 Nov 2024. No whisper of the ethnic inferno that had swallowed his livelihood.

Tanushree Naorem refused to let the hypocrisy slide. To Indus Towers and Innovsource she wrote with unflinching precision: “In this regard, kindly submit a detailed explanation at the earliest for favour of taking further necessary action.” To the Joint Secretary, Home Department, she pressed with equal force: “In this regard, I am to request you to kindly submit your comments at the earliest for favour of taking further necessary action.”

She also promised Sudhir that her office would fight for every private worker trapped in this limbo. Her Sunday became legend; her pen became a sword.Yet Sudhir’s descent had begun long before this intervention.

Before May 3, 2023, he was a telecom technician scaling towers in Senapati’s Maram, breathing highland wind and diesel, keeping Manipur connected. 

But today, in his small room in New Checkon Chingang Leikai in Imphal East, the evening light is the colour of old tea. Khoisnam Sudhir sits on the floor, knees drawn up, staring at the iron rod he carried home from the workshop. His palms are cracked, black with rust. His seven-year-old daughter, traces the burn on his wrist with a tiny finger. 

The pain is no longer in the skin; it is everywhere.Two years and eight months ago, Sudhir was a telecom technician with Indus Towers Ltd., posted in Senapati District. His wife is a part time make up artist. Their eldest son, Class 7, used to wait at the gate with a football. His little daughter, who is  Class 1 believed her father could fix anything—even the sky if it broke.

Then came May 3, 2023.
The sky did break.

Khoisnam Sudhir never went back to work. Roads turned into checkpoints of terror. Motbung, Sapermeina, Kangpokpi became no-go zones for a Meitei technician. Indus Towers, to its credit, paid him for a full year despite zero work. But by November 6, 2024, the paychecks stopped. Sudhir and around ten Meitei colleagues received polite termination letters—regretful, final, bloodless. 

Some friends fled to Nagaland’s Mon district, loading scooters onto trucks at dawn, only to bleed savings dry and return defeated. Sudhir stayed. His wife’s bridal business withered as weddings turned into funerals of joy. He took up welding in a cramped shed, hands blackened with rust, earnings barely covering his son’s overdue van fees. His home stood intact, but it was a hollow shell.

The weight of Manipur’s unending conflict is etched into the trembling hands of 40 years old Sudhir. On September 11, 2024, psychiatrist Dr. Nelson Lotongbam gently documented a heart-wrenching truth: Sudhir is now living with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and sudden, suffocating panic attacks—shadows cast by the violence of May 3, 2023, and the cruel silence that followed his termination in November 2024.

Sudhir is not alone. Thousands like him—private workers torn from their jobs by roads turned hostile—carry invisible scars. Their pain doesn’t make headlines, but in clinic rooms and empty homes, it screams. His fight is theirs. And in his courage to seek help, there is quiet, stubborn hope.

On 9 May 2025, Sudhir submitted a letter to the Governor of Manipur. It was not a rant. It was a plea. In it, he laid bare his life:Since 14/11/2018, 

"I have been working in the private telecom sector as Land Acquisition for the USOF project (Airtel) and later deputed to Technician… posted in Senapati District. This job was my only source of livelihood…
Due to the violence that erupted on 3rd May, 2023, I have lost my job… As a Meitei civilian, I cannot go to discharge my job responsibilities at Maram under Senapati District as I have to necessarily cross areas dominated by the Kukis such as Motbung, Sapermeina, Kangpokpi, etc.

The inability of the State to restore law and order… resulted in loss of livelihood sources… I am undergoing mental depression and have developed other psychological issues including panic attacks.

I therefore request your Excellency to kindly consider making an alternative arrangement… by way of engaging in any suitable job commensurate with my experiences, skills and educational qualifications… This will definitely lift up my state of economic and health depressions."

Again, on August 19, 2025, he escalated with a CPGRAMS grievance under Labour & Employment > Termination/Dismissal, referencing the ignored Governor’s letter. The Deputy Chief Labour Commissioner (Central) in Guwahati confirmed jurisdiction on August 21 and forwarded the file to Manipur.

Unfortunately, the storm followed Sudhir even to Kolkata. On September 15, 2025, in a modest arbitration chamber, Sabyasachi Das presided over Axis Bank Ltd. vs. Khoisnam Sudhir Singh—a cold case of loan default born from unpaid EMIs after his termination. The bank’s advocate appeared, armed with documents and deadlines. Sudhir did not. He could not. A journey from Imphal to Kolkata demanded ₹30,000–₹40,000—money he no longer had, money that once paid school van fees and rice sacks. No counter-statement was filed; no voice rose in his defense. 

The minutes, scribbled in legal shorthand, offered a sliver of mercy: “another opportunity may be given… last chance… next meeting peremptorily fixed for 11.11.2025 at 4:30 P.M.” That date has passed, unheeded, unreachable. An ex-parte judgment now looms like a guillotine. And the fees—₹1,000 per meeting, split evenly—accrue relentlessly. Sudhir’s unpaid share grows like interest on a debt of despair, compounding the silence of a man already buried under the weight of survival.

How does a man like Sudhir attend? Imphal to Kolkata via Guwahati: ₹10,000–₹12,000 one-way, often higher. Return: ₹15,000–₹20,000. Budget hotel near Kasba: ₹2,000/night. Food: ₹500–₹1,000/day. Total: ₹30,000–₹40,000 for a three-day dash. Sudhir is jobless now.

Meanwhile, the letter dispatched from the Deputy Chief Labour Commissioner (Central) in Guwahati on August 21, 2025, languished in the receipt file of the Manipur Labour Department—buried beneath the usual avalanche of routine paperwork, awaiting the next working day in a system where urgency too often dissolves into inertia.

As soon as the file landed on the Deputy Labour Commissioner’s desk.Tanushree Naorem did not shelve it under “Pending.” She did not wait for Monday. She did not treat Sudhir as a statistic. On November 9 she called him in; on November 12 she struck.Her letters were not polite requests; they were demands, asking the two companies - Indus Tower and Innovsource to explain the reasons for terminating an employee. To the State Home Department: asking their comments on the law and order vaccum which led to bleed the private workers. 

Tanushree also copied the Guwahati labour office and Sudhir himself—transparency as weapon. Sudhir is one of thousands—the silent victims. Seventy thousand IDPs in relief camps have tarpaulin roofs, IDP cards, and the promise of reconstruction. Their suffering is photographed, quantified, televised. 

Khoisnam Sudhir and his ten friends are victims twice over. First, when mobs forced them from workplaces. Second, when the system abandoned them. Even if peace returns tomorrow—if roads reopen, if Meiteis and Kukis walk the same streets without fear—Sudhir’s future remains dark.

The IDPs get support. These technicians get silence.They do not seek vengeance. They harbor no anger at the state for failing to protect them. They are hurt—deeply—by the negligence of being unseen.They ask only for a lifeline. Anything to restart. To stand again.

Central aid will rebuild the walls of the IDPs in relief camps. But Sudhir’s walls stand; his world inside has crumbled. The IDPs dream of return. Sudhir grips an iron rod and a welding flame.

A social activist who has spent months working with IDPs in Manipur suggests that the President’s Rule must act—not with speeches, but with targeted economic rehabilitation. This includes an immediate moratorium on loans taken by conflict-displaced private workers; subsidised legal aid and virtual hearings for out-of-state arbitration; travel vouchers for mandatory court appearances; a Conflict-Affected Livelihood Restoration Fund offering ₹5 lakh interest-free startup capital per verified terminated worker; priority access to PMEGP, Mudra, and Stand-Up India schemes with relaxed collateral; exclusive job melas for private-sector conflict victims; subsidised housing and transport allowances for relocated staff; and fast-track disposal of all CPGRAMS-forwarded and Governor-addressed termination cases within 30 days.

Until then, every unpaid van fee, every sold motorcycle, every iron rod Sudhir bends, every unanswered letter to the Governor, every forwarded file that gathers dust is a reminder: peace is not the absence of violence—it is the presence of justice.

For Sudhir, his ten friends, and thousands like them, the war never ended. It just moved indoors—into empty kitchens, sleepless nights, and the quiet terror of a family on the edge.

The State Home Department must match the Deputy Labour Commissioner’s urgency. Government staff are transferred to safe zones with allowances. Private workers get nothing. Security escorts, safe passage, or alternative postings could let Sudhir climb towers again—in Imphal valley. 

Tanushree Naorem has lit a spark. Her  letters are not paper—they are justice in motion. Her Sunday in the Secretariat is a rebellion against resignation. Let the Home Department, the President’s Rule administration fan this spark into a flame. 

The relentless probe into the silent victims of Manipur violence, from Sudhir’s Senapati tower to every shuttered ATM in the hills, has cracked open a system that long ignored them. The Deputy Labour Commissioner's letters are not ink on paper but a clarion call for accountability, forcing companies and the state to confront the human wreckage of law-and-order collapse. 

To Khoisnam Sudhir and every displaced worker gripping rust and regret: stand tall. Your scars are evidence, your voice a weapon. Fight on with the courage that once carried you up towers; justice is climbing toward you now.