The Times of India listing of the dirtiest cities with a population of under lakh places Shillong in the 6th position. This has naturally got the goat of those who sit in their comfort zones and believe everything’s alright with the world around them. But the ugly truth has got to be told and people have to own up to their disgusting habit of littering at every conceivable place. Shillong is the world’s window to Meghalaya. That single survey by the ToI has gone viral and will now make people wonder if it’s worth spending money on a dirty old city. Those unaware of how dirty Shillong has become should take a walk from the Raj Bhavan down to Polo Ground and see how garbage is dumped by the roadside in what is an elite locality. It’s not always the people of a particular locality that are responsible for turning their habitat into a dump. People have been seen flinging bags of garbage out of their vehicle windows without a twinge of conscience. There’s a limit to policing such arriviste. There are too many of them. CCTV cameras in Oakland have caught well-dressed people carrying a plastic bag of garbage and dumping them by the road side. Unless the Urban Affairs Department spends part of its meager budget on policing such delinquents chances are that such remorseless dumping of garbage anywhere and everywhere will only continue.
Many groups and institutions have tried to spread the message of cleanliness and have even physically cleared garbage every day or once a week at rivers and vantage points like the Shillong golf course. The team from Jiva/City Hut Dhaba led by its proprietor Jiwat Vaswani had been cleaning different parts of the city until the pandemic halted their efforts and that of other groups, on account of the social distancing protocol. The point of the Clean-up is also to create awareness and shame people so that they stop treating every corner of the city as their private garbage dump.
However, what ails Shillong is the substantive issue of there being no elected Civic Body in Shillong and hence no accountability mechanism in place. The Dorbar Shnong cannot substitute for a democratically elected body with legal protocols in place and with direct funding from the central government. Meghalaya has not been able to access funds from the Urban Affairs Ministry due to the absence of the crucial elected body, complete with gender equity components in place. But it seems the traditionalists would rather forego the money for rescuing the city’s collapsing civic management system than mend their ways. So Shillong is likely to see itself in a far worse situation in the days to come, unless a Government with a tough spine to tackle cacophonous status-quoists decides that what must be done has to be done.