In the Northeast of India back in the 1990s, there wasn’t much else on offer for the Jajo sisters. Foreign retail stores and businesses made few inroads in the 1990s despite economic liberalisation in 1992 that enabled foreign direct investment. Military operations and curfews also curtailed economic activity in the state, which was troubled with insurgencies. That left little room for the local economy to grow at the pace of the rest of India.
For clothes, locals in the state of Manipur have relied for decades on apparel from the street markets of Hong Kong and Bangkok making its way through Bangladesh or Myanmar, both of which share long and porous borders with India’s Northeast. Even more abundant are bundles of used clothes sourced from charities in the West and Asia, nations such as South Korea, proving popular among the region’s predominantly indigenous tribal communities.