Patricia Mukhim
Sooner than later the world has to open up; our country will have to relax the lockdown, albeit gradually post May 3. Meghalaya too will have to ease its grip on citizens’ movements even as the state hammers in the need for social distancing. This is easier said than done. Despite the lockdown, wherever the enforcement is slack (policing) people continue to function in pairs and more. While citizens have learnt to queue at a safe distance of one metre while waiting to purchase supplies and that is huge progress in a country like India, one wonders if they will respect this norm once the curfew eases. What requires constant drumming into people’s minds is that violating social distancing has serious consequences. Perhaps every locality needs youth volunteers to manage the crowd. As a journalist who moves around to feel the pulse of the city, I know the crowded areas are Madanrting, Nongmynsong, Pynthor Bah and adjoining areas and localities surrounding Paltan Bazar. The other localities are fairly disciplined. How to maintain social distancing is the challenge because it is likely that we will head towards community infection of Covid19, which has so far been restricted to a primary source.
Economic revival:
The central government and the states are worried sick about the body blow that Covid19 has inflicted on the economy. Job losses will cause pain to the centre and states in the immediate future, until India and the states reconfigure their economic models. This is where I feel that the “business as usual model,” will not work. Meghalaya will have to think of alternative models of job creation beyond the Tourism sector which will take a while to resuscitate itself. Hotels, guest-houses and home-stays are in shutdown mode. What alternative employment can those in the Tourism industry find? This cries for an answer and for strategies.
In a sense, Covid19 is a war we are fighting and every war throws up leaders. Who can forget Winston Churchill – a strategist par excellence and a prime minister who led England to victory in the Second World War! So yes the Chief Minister of Meghalaya has to grab at that Churchillian moment and think big if he wants history to remember him. In fact, this pandemic has revealed that even if there is a cabinet in Meghalaya, only a few ministers have really pulled their weight. The rest are silent spectators. So will they have anything of substance to contribute to the knowledge bank of the state vis-a-vis the economic regeneration? This is why competence cannot be compromised at the altar of politics.
But coming to economics, Meghalaya is the only state so far to have an Economic Development Council legislated sometime in 1992. This has been relegated to the dog house and has become a parking space for failed politicians who have milked it over the years. This Council should be revived and populated by economists, entrepreneurs who have been successful with start-ups, financial investors and a couple of MLAs from both ruling and opposition parties. Meghalaya cannot continue to rely only on its coal and limestone, both of which are causing massive destruction to the environment. In fact, if Covid19 has taught us anything at all, then, it is not to mess around with the environment. New avenues must be explored. The state has to assess its human resource potential and use that to maximise job opportunities.
The Meghalaya Economic Development Council can be that economic think-tank and the engine for charting out a long term, viable economic policy for the State taking cognisance of the fact that this region is a biodiversity hotspot and that violating environment norms would have devastating consequences. Also its time for the State to disband any and all institutions that have become moribund – the State Planning Board being one. It has not produced any visible outcomes’ so too a few others. Meghalaya cannot afford to waste money on idle institutions. Post Covid the Chief Minister has to look at the interests of the State and its people and not at the survival of his Party and the Government. This is the time for the CM to show statesmanship.
Ease of doing business in Meghalaya has always been a sore point with industrialists. The creation of a single window clearance platform has not helped one bit. Investors still have to do the rounds of the Secretariat, meet politicians; pay bribes etc. So the permit-license raj thrives in Meghalaya.
Missing points during the Covid briefings
Some chief ministers made their press briefings swish and professional. They include the Kerala CM, Pinarayi Vijayan and Delhi CM, Arvind Kejriwal. Both would always have a medical specialist alongside to answer the techno-medical questions. This is very helpful for the media because when a doctor or doctors are present they can also inform the media on several other issues that matter to the public. One fails to understand why it is always the CM and Deputy CM that brief the media on a medical exigency. Can the CM please clear our doubts on this? Don’t we have qualified epidemiologists and public health experts in Meghalaya? They have not spoken a word to the media since Covid19 arrived here on April 13. This is unprecedented because Covid19 is not a political and administrative problem. It’s a medical emergency.
This virus has tested the Government to its limits. While there have been lapses, by and large the Government has acquitted itself fairly well. One area where the Government is on the back-foot though is on strategic communication strategies. Communication about Covid has not reached every corner of this state even today. There is fear, paranoia and consequently the propensity to stigmatize. This fear will be heightened when students and migrant workers return after May 5. Hence rapid communication has to reach the last person in every village so that people overcome their fears and assumptions about Covid19. The temptation would be to “Other” those returning to Meghalaya. The point about Covid is that there can be no We (the unaffected) and They (the probably affected and carriers). More than at any other time we have to stand Together and defeat this disease.
Government needs to be more transparent about where it needs helping hands and also admit that it has not succeeded on every front. As has been stated earlier no government in this world has a standard operating procedure (SOP) to deal with Covid 19. They are all operating on a trial and error format. So Government cannot feel threatened by questions but needs to confront them in a transparent manner. Being transparent in the time of a pandemic is to accept the ‘fact’ that the lives of others are more than convenient statistics.
Revisiting state policies:
Meghalaya is not a purely agrarian society because there is not enough agricultural land for scaling up cultivation of any single crop. We have never been self-sufficient in food grains. So what are our inherent strengths in this sector? Perhaps there is need to revisit the Agricultural-Horticultural sector and even the Fisheries sector. After so much Government support via the thousand ponds scheme, Meghalaya is still largely dependent on fish from Assam and Andhra Pradesh. Even during the lockdown fish is regularly coming from Andhra. Our dependence on that State for fish is unquestioning. So what are our fish ponds producing? It’s time to take stock of these ponds and perhaps the idea that Meghalaya can be self sufficient in fish is largely over-rated.
Meghalaya’s strength lies in its niche products such as turmeric, ginger, honey, and now the Kiwi and Strawberry fruits. Promoting farming of such exotic fruits with a thriving market outside Meghalaya and now over e-commerce platforms should be encouraged. Rice is mostly grown for self –consumption. Very little enters the market. Meghalaya still relies on Assam for vegetables too. Hence these are areas requiring rejig.
One lesson from Covid19 is that there is merit in being self reliant. However, employment generation for the large constituency of youth also requires that Meghalaya revisit its land-use policy. You cannot create jobs if there is a section that is eternally cribbing about land being alienated. A transparent system of land acquisition for software industries and educational institutions et al should be worked out. The cranky activists that put a stop to every project should be told to give solutions and not to put a spanner in the works for every project that Government takes up.
We have a lot of work to do. Let’s start by being more consultative and transparent.