Meghalaya’s politicians and bureaucrats have a penchant for foreign jaunts. They need the flimsiest of reasons to make them drop everything they are doing, pack their bags and as the song says, ‘leave on a jet plane.’ They have travelled for promoting tourism but the situation back home is such that they cannot even organise a proper tourism event along the lines of the Hornbill Festival in Nagaland which attracts tourists by the hundreds from across the globe. This time even the annual Autumn Festival has got a go by. The first thing that a state wishing to promote tourism does is to learn from other countries how Sunday is never closed. Here, if a tourist arrives on a Sunday and drives up from Guwahati airport to Shillong he/she would be hard pressed to find a single food stall! Not even those ostensibly promoted by the Government!
Considering that babus are today being trained in no less a country than the USA, it is a pity that they seem to have imbibed nothing of worth. If they did they would have had some strategy paper to offer on this ongoing imbroglio which is stuck between two contesting view-points, none of them relevant to the influx issue. Perhaps what bureaucrats need more than these foreign jaunts is to spend time in the field and learn about what is actually creating despondency for such a large section of the population of this State. How can a developing country with its multifarious complexities expect to learn anything from a first nation that has no experience of dealing with the kind of diversities and ethnicities that India and the state of Meghalaya encounters?
The Chief Minister appears to be the most travelled person. That he can leave the State at a time when it is imperilled by agitations and turmoil is rather strange, unless he is under stress and the trip is one way of de-stressing. Also that the higher bureaucracy in Meghalaya has come up with an apology of an Act to curb influx shows that they really have not brainstormed on the most effective mechanisms to address the issue. Seems like they are afflicted by thinking fatigue! Hence the needless travels to foreign lands as a distraction from real time problems.
