By Rafiul Alom Rahman
In a recent visit to a private clinic in Hallidayganj, a village in the plain belt of West Garo Hills in Meghalaya, I had a terrible encounter. A poor woman, who had complications in childbirth, was in urgent need of blood, and had to be driven almost 130 Kilometres away to Goalpara, a town in lower Assam that has in the recent years seen a number of private hospitals mushrooming up. The family had believed the doctor in his little clinic in Hallidayganj would offer a miracle, but he could only give the patient a few injectibles and advise for her to be taken to a hospital at the earliest. The family members were helpless. It took me little time to realize that they didn’t have the resources or the mental strength to take the patient to a private hospital in Goalpara town.
This incident left me in a state of shock, anger and utter helplessness at the lack of basic healthcare facilities in the state. At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is busy campaigning for Smart Cities and Digital India, people in the region have to make do with abysmal roads, frequent power-cuts, dysfunctional schools and a negligent health sector. The only district-level hospital in West Garo Hills – the Tura Civil Hospital, is located in the district headquarters, Tura – at a distance of about 52 Kilometres from Hallidayganj. In the case of an emergency, people in the plain belt have little choice but to find their way to a private hospital in towns like Goalpara. But that is only when you have the money to afford privatized healthcare. Many people do not have that choice.
The plain belt of West Garo Hills, bordering the Dhubri, South Salmara and Goalpara districts of lower Assam and the neighbouring Bangladesh, and having a non-tribal population that comprises mostly of Bengali-speaking Muslims, caste Hindus, Biharis and Axomiyas, remains one of the most neglected regions in Meghalaya. Stretching from Tikrikilla to Mahendraganj over the Western plains of Garo Hills and housing two non-reserved constituencies – Phulbari and Rajabala, the region is marred by wide-scale unemployment, poor educational and health indicators, unchecked crimes such as extortion and kidnapping, and river erosion-induced displacement – triggered every year by floods in the Brahmaputra river and its tributary, Zingiram.
The Bengali-speaking Muslim community, often configured in mainstream media narratives as the ‘illegal Bangladeshi immigrant’ or ‘outsider’, comprises a significant part of the population in the plain belt. According to the 2011 census, the percentage of Muslims in Meghalaya is 4.40 percent, and a significant number of Muslims (16.60 percent) reside in West Garo Hills. Earlier a part of Assam, the state of Meghalaya was created in 1972 under the State Re-organisation Act of 1971. The All Party Hill Leaders’ Conference (APHLC), a conglomerate of political groups from the Garo and Khasi-Jaintia Hills that was formed in 1961 to push the mandate for a separate hill state, assured the minority communities in the hills that their legitimate interests would be taken care of in the new state.
However, the plain belt of Garo Hills, because of its historical, social and cultural proximity with erstwhile Bengal and parts of Assam, and its largely non-tribal population, continues to be a blot on the landscape. There have been consistent demands in recent years by various Garo organizations in the region such as the Garo Students’ Union (GSU) to bar non-tribals from voting in the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council (GHADC) elections. This would effectively mean cutting them off from socioeconomic and political benefits.
44 years since the creation of Meghalaya, the plain belt of the Garo Hills remains educationally, socially and economically disadvantaged. As per the 2011 census, the literacy rate of West Garo Hills was 68.38 percent whereas the overall literacy rate of Meghalaya was 74.3 percent. The highest among all the districts in Meghalaya, the literacy rate of East Khasi Hills, was 84.7 percent in 2011. This shows that while East Khasi Hills has a literacy rate greater than the overall literacy rate of Meghalaya, West Garo Hills lags behind by 5.92 percent. Add to this the data for the various sub-divisions within West Garo Hills and what you have is a dismal picture of the plight of education in the region.
The fact that a large number of Secondary and Senior Secondary schools operate on an Ad Hoc basis only aggravates the problem. It is no surprise that there is not a single Government Secondary or Senior Secondary school in the plain belt. A meagre salary coupled with the total lack of job security in schools that function under the Ad Hoc Grant in AID scheme de-motivates teachers from performing well. Low income families who often send their children to these schools have to pay the price for a system that is at best indifferent to the educational needs of young people.
A host of factors contribute to the backwardness and underdevelopment of the area with political apathy topping the chart. It is only ironical that the current and the first ever non-tribal Speaker of the Meghalaya State Assembly, Abu Taher Mondol is a legislator from the Phulbari constituency and is a resident of this area. When I first heard the news of Mondol being appointed as the Speaker of the Meghalaya State Assembly under the Mukul Sangmaled Congress government, I was filled with a sense of pride. For a non-tribal and a Bengali-speaking Muslim to be the Speaker of Meghalaya was indeed a historic event and need to be celebrated. It signifies not only Mondol’s personal grit, determination and leadership skills, but also the generational leap of a community against impending odds. (Rafiul Alom Rahman is a research scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at rafiul.delhi @gmail.com.)