Manipur: Loktak Lake

Loktak Lake, near Imphal, is the largest freshwater lake in Northeast India and is famous nationally and internationally for its phumdis — thick, floating masses of vegetation, soil, and organic matter that accumulate on the lake's surface and are strong enough to support structures, footpaths, and even entire habitats on top of the water. The single largest and most compact phumdi mass sits within the lake and has been demarcated as Keibul Lamjao National Park, the world's only floating national park (as covered in this series' national parks volume), which is the last natural refuge of the endangered Sangai or brow-antlered deer, a subspecies of deer found nowhere else in the wild and one that grazes and lives directly on the floating phumdi surface. Loktak is a Ramsar-designated wetland and is also economically central to Manipur, supporting fishing communities who live in small huts built directly on phumdis and practise a distinctive circular fishing technique (locally called athaphum) using ring-shaped floating enclosures.

Loktak's phumdis are also a live current-affairs and environmental-management flashpoint: unregulated growth of phumdi mass (partly driven by nutrient pollution and partly by the operation of the Ithai Barrage downstream, which has altered the lake's natural water-level fluctuation since its construction in the 1980s) has periodically choked open water and disrupted both navigation and the Sangai deer's habitat, prompting repeated and sometimes controversial phumdi-clearance and eviction drives targeting fishing settlements built on them.

Memory hook: "Loktak's phumdis float the Sangai deer's park, feed Manipur's ring-net fishers, and keep getting cleared because the Ithai Barrage changed the water level." One chained sentence, four linked facts.

Practice Recall: Before reading on, name the floating vegetation mats that give Loktak Lake its fame, and the endangered deer species that lives on the largest of them inside a specifically named national park.

Answer: Phumdis; the Sangai (brow-antlered deer), inside Keibul Lamjao National Park.

Loktak's fishing communities practise a distinctive method called athaphum fishing, in which a ring-shaped section of phumdi is cut, anchored, and used as a floating fish-attracting enclosure — fish congregate under and around the ring's shade and root mass, and are periodically harvested from within it, a traditional aquaculture technique found in largely this form nowhere else in India. Loktak also sits within its own Loktak Lake Wildlife Sanctuary/Ramsar buffer landscape, and the lake as a whole (not only the Keibul Lamjao portion) has been proposed at various points for Biosphere Reserve consideration, reflecting how central it is to Manipur's ecological identity beyond the specific Sangai-deer story.