By Patricia Mukhim
Prime Minister arrived in Assam on May 24 for the swearing-in of Sarbananda Sonowal. After the rout in Bihar and Delhi, the Assam victory has boosted the morale of the BJP which now wants to spread its wings in the other North Eastern states after having installed a BJP-led Government in Arunachal Pradesh using Article 356 as a modus operandi. Now only Meghalaya, Mizoram and Manipur remain with the Congress, the other big state being Karnataka. We don’t know where the Lotus will bloom next and frankly speaking we ought not to care too much about the ideology of a political party if its agenda remains that of a people-centric development. In the tribal areas of the North East where land is a precious commodity and is intrinsically linked to their culture and their very lives, any development that displaces the indigenous people should be avoided. The BJP should learn to respect the cultural nuances and the culture and tradition of the tribes, rather than talk of cultural nationalism which seeks to mainstream our unique cultures under one big umbrella. Rather than preach nationalism the BJP would do well to leave that to citizens. We know our duties and we do better when left to our devices. In fact the resistance to the BJP comes from the fact that the Party or its frontal wings (RSS) seek to impose sanctions on our way of life. This does not endear the Party to the people at all. In fact antennae are up in Shillong as people believe a BJP Government will come with all its baggage of Hindutva, beef ban, restrictions on minorities et al. Mr Modi will have to assure the people of Meghalaya and the north east that a BJP Government is not going to be an anti-minority, anti-tribal, anti-poor and pro-business, pro-rich government!
Agenda for Action:
Roads: The lifeline of Meghalaya
If Mr Modi has the time to drive around some of the most unkempt parts of Meghalaya away from the city of Shillong he would get to see how the PWD Minister- Engineer and Contractor nexus has eaten up our roads and how these three important constituents in our scheme of things have turned the Public Works Department into a fiefdom. Mr Modi should also know that the PWD Ministry in Meghalaya is in the hands of the biggest contractor who runs a family construction firm. Despite repeated complaints from citizens about the quality of roads many of which have lost their character and resemble kutcha roads where the bitumen and gravel have long been washed away by the rains and the raw earth is exposed, no action is taken. Here the roads are not built according to specifications because of the need to cut costs. Hence there are roads where two small vehicles can hardly pass without one pushing itself into the drain to let the other pass. How can this be tolerated in 21st century India? Yet this is what successive Congress Governments have done to Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram et al. In Meghalaya the Chief Minister has taken on the personal challenge of bringing international experts for road making projects in Garo Hills but he has left the Khasi and Jaintia Hills to suffer the consequences of the greed of his PWD Minister.
Airport:
Shillong has been the capital of undivided Assam yet it is the only state capital other than Itanagar that does not have a fully functioning airport. Hence passengers have to depend on Guwahati airport. The expansion project for Umroi airport is delayed because of corruption and court cases. It appears that people whose lands were taken were not compensated, while others who gave no land received money from the Deputy Commissioner’s office. How such a scam can happen and is allowed to simmer without the CBI stepping in is difficult to fathom. Meghalaya needs an airport because we have the North East Indira Gandhi Regional Institute for Health and Medical Sciences (NEIGRIHMS), the Rajiv Gandhi Indian Institute of Management (RGIIM) and North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) all of which host visiting professors/specialists from across the country and abroad to enhance the skills of their personnel/students. These professors find it a waste of their time to spend three hours each way to and from Guwahati airport and hence refuse to come here. Other than the politicians and bureaucrats who have time to kill, no one else wants to do this tiresome journey to Guwahati airport and back, given a choice. Besides if Meghalaya wants to sell itself as a destination for soft skills and become an Information Technology (IT) hub it must have easy aerial access. So Mr Modi the BJP has its work cut out here.
Why reduce IIM Shillong to a family fiefdom? Remove the Rajiv Gandhi tag
The Indian Institute of Management (IIM) at Shillong is equivalent to other IIMs in the country and was set up along with a few others, all of which go by the name of the place they are located in such as IIM- Kozhikode, IIM-Amritsar, IIM-Udaipur etc. Only the IIM at Shillong is prefixed with the name of Rajiv Gandhi thereby creating confusion in the minds of applicants that it is a privately run management institute. It is time now to remove this superfluous tag and let it be seen as a public institution named after the city it is located in – IIM-SHILLONG. This will be a great service to the Institution and help it attract more talent and management aspirants.
Health Infrastructure:
After Assam, Meghalaya must be having the worst health indicators. Studies have shown that even in this day and age children in rural Meghalaya suffer Vitamin A deficiency which affects their cognitive ability. In other words they will grow up as cretins, incapable of being productive citizens of a progressive nation. This is unpardonable, yet it continues while health practitioners and the government look the other way. Family welfare and planning are non-starters here. And cancer which is a raging disease still does not have effective treatment facilities in Meghalaya. The cancer infrastructure is wanting and so is the human resource. We need a state of the art cancer unit at NEIGRIHMS because the state government does not seem capable of managing one. This requires immediate central intervention.
What merits mention is also the high infant and maternal mortality rates. And believe it or not the State Government has no statistics on this. Whatever we have are those form the National Family Health Survey. The last IMR survey of 2012 says there are 49 deaths for every 1000 births. Maternal mortality ratio is 291.37 deaths per 100,000 births, which is slightly below Assam at 389/100,000. Women suffer malnutrition and worse. The statistics are as bad as that of the tribals of Kerala which Modi had compared to Somalia.
Organic farming where?
Meghalaya has been puffing itself up about going organic without knowing the resistance that would come from the politicians (heading Agriculture & Horticulture) and the technocrats and bureaucrats of the Department who have a nexus with the fertilisers and pesticides industry. So we can take this assertion with a pinch of salt because no one is going to accept that we are producing organic stuff unless we go through stringent quality control protocols. Perhaps we need to humbly sit with the Sikkim CM, Pawan Chamling and learn from him how Sikkim has done it.
If these points come within the radar of the Central Government and the moribund NEC it might help our cause. Else we in Meghalaya are doomed. I am aware that some of the subjects mentioned are within the purview of the state and Modi believes in competitive federalism but as PM he ought to know how states perform and why they are laggards. On this note, I rest my case.