By H H Mohrmen
Jowai now is greeting all visitors with streets litter with dirt all over the town. At certain locations of the town one will also see piles of garbage which is mounting every day. It looks like Jowai is on the competition for the honour of becoming the dirtiest town in the world and no prizes for guessing the cause of the predicament. The reason is because the employees of the Jowai Municipal Board have once again gone on strike to demand their rights. The employees of the Board who are responsible for keeping our town clean have not received their salaries for over eight months. And it is not the first time that the staff of the Board have had to resort to a strike to pressure those in power to redress their grievances. But each time a solution was arrived at it was a stop gap arrangement with no efforts to solve this problem once and for all.
Unlike Shillong which has written records of the beginning of the city since it was established, there is not much written records about Jowai in the pre-British period. But Jowai being one of the oldest towns in the hills is rich in tradition and culture and people still maintain their spiritual connection with nature by keeping certain space and natural phenomenon as sacred. But the town which abounds in traditions and spirituality is now facing a gigantic problem of garbage disposal.
Like any other town, Jowai too developed naturally with no proper planning. The town which was a composition of many localities (dongs) is now becoming an unplanned urban settlement. As this new urban settlement gradually developed into a town, the dongs or localities maintain their local dorbar dong or dorbar shnong but later the Jaintia Hills Autonomous District Council constituted the Jowai Town Committee to cater to the overall need and development of the entire town. JHADC conducts regular elections to the Jowai Town Committee and people exercise their franchise to elect their local representatives. In 1995 when Dr R C Laloo MLA of Jowai constituency was a minister in the state government and Moonlight Pariat was the Chief Executive Member of the Jaintia Hills Autonomous District Council, the Jowai Town Committee was dissolved to make way for creation of the Jowai Municipal Board. It is therefore not wrong to conclude that JMB is R C Laloo’s baby. Unfortunately since the creation of the JMB the Board had never had any election and every now and then the chairman of the Board was appointed by the government without any members.
In 2010 an organization called Jowai Civic Awareness Committee was formed. It demanded that the government conduct elections to the Jowai Municipal Board, but there are also organizations which opposed the creation of the JMB and were also against conducting any election to the Board. The fear of influx of non tribals to the town was the main reason people opposed the creation of the municipal board. A section of the population also opposed the creation of the JMB because for fear of having to pay tax, particularly house tax. Their argument is that it was against the house tax that u Kiang Nangbah had led a revolt against the British government. Hence they were against the Board too. But what we do not realize is that u Kiang Nangbah’s revolt was against a tax levied by a foreign power; now we have a country of our own.
Because the election was not held and the government too had not appointed anyone as chairman of the JMB, the office of the Jowai Municipal Board is now headed only by the Chief Executive Officer who looks after the day to day affairs of the Board. The JMB is therefore functioning as an ad hoc organization and because the state government cannot hold any election as mandated by the central government, hence funds from the Ministry of Urban affairs are also not forthcoming. The non- availability of funds from the state government and also the dearth of funds from the Central government is the major cause for funds constraints of the Jowai Municipal Board.
The staff of the JMB under the banner of the Jowai Municipal Board Employee’s Association has once again decided to call for an indefinite strike from the beginning of last week. The only demand was that the Government should pay the ninety odd employees of the Board their salaries pending for more than eight months now. Not even a week had lapsed since the employees of the JMB launched their indefinite strike and the town’s folks are already complaining.
The administration has already anticipated that this would happen and few months back convened a meeting of the headmen of all the localities of Jowai to discuss this issue. The deputy commissioner had proposed the enhancement of the monthly fee per household for collection and dumping of waste. But the headmen of the localities of Jowai rejected the proposal outright. The government is now spending about rupees nine lakh per month on the salaries of the employees working in the JMB while the localities are only willing to pay rupees thirty rupees per month to the JMB for collection and disposal or garbage.
It is ironic that while individual households in the town had their backyards clean spick and span yet the same people are not worried about the streets in the town littered with dirt and garbage at many locations. So why are we not willing to pay? Or do we still think that somebody else should clean the mess that we made? Or are we of the opinion that it is the government’s responsibility to clean the mess that we have made. The board has already calculated that there are five hundred ninety seven households in Jowai and it will only cause them less than two hundred rupees per months to pay the nine lakh per month needed to clean our mess. Yet the Rangbah Shnong are unwilling to shell the much needed money to clean our town.
Now Jowai also has two major markets; the premiere Iawmusiang and the new Iaw-thymme market at Ladthalaboh, Jowai. In these two markets there are also hundreds of shops and commercial establishments which should also be taxed for the services they use. Then there are also markets run by faith groups in the town like those run by the Sein Raid, Jowai, the Presbyterian Church, Jowai and the Church of North East India. These organizations should enhance the amount they pay to the Board to enable the JMB to pay their staff. After all, they are also running a business.
It has been a week since the staffs of JMB begin their strike on April 4, yet none of the public representatives of the town have taken cognizance of the problem. Neither the MLA Dr R C Laloo who is highly educated nor the local MDC Andrew A Shullai who is also a Deputy CEM JHADC or the other MDCs of the town like Moonlight Pariat and Marki Mulieh did anything to address this public grievance. R C Laloo has failed the town he was born in, time and again and this problem is also of his creation because the Municipal Board is his own creation. He cannot also wash his hands off this issue because he has represented Jowai since 1983 except for the two terms when he was defeated by Singh Mulieh. So Laloo must be held responsible for whatever befalls the town.
Now foul smell is emanating from these garbage mounds but only the pedestrians have to face the problem because all our leaders are driving on their swanky SUVs with all the windows closed. Even if our leaders had failed us, thankfully good sense still prevails in the young people. On April 9 last five days after the JMB strike started, some young people from villages like Mushrot, Rymbai, Iooksi, Mukroh and few from Jowai decided to remove the garbage collected at the heart of the town in front of the Jowai Police station. That morning 15 pick-ups of garbage were removed and the group of young volunteers under the leadership of one Nehemayah Tyngkan even paid for the cost of transportation of the garbage to the dumping ground.
Jowai is being neglected by its leaders and it is time for the young people to take over from these incompetent leaders.