By Barnes Mawrie
The adverse consequence of this is evidently scarcity of jobs. More and more of our youth are getting educated and qualified but there are no jobs for them. No wonder thousands of educated youth are seen queuing at every employment centre.
Come 2022 and we enter the golden jubilee year of Meghalaya’s statehood. Jubilees are celebrated with a sense of achievement and glory. Statehood is definitely an event to be celebrated and thanks to our Hill State fighters who struggled resolutely to achieve autonomy from Assam and carved out an autonomous state of our own on 21st January 1972. It is right that we should celebrate the memory of those valiant souls like Capt. W. A. Sangma, S D D Nichols Roy, Prof. G G Swell, B B Lyngdoh, PR Kyndiah, Prof M N Majaw, J D Pohrmen and others, who made this dream of statehood possible. However, the foundation stone for development which they have laid has never been fully built upon by their successors. Meghalaya has become a full-fledged adult by age reckoning but unfortunately it still remains an infant in terms of growth and development.
Fifty years is a long enough time for a person to grow richer, better, fatter or taller. It is a long enough period for anyone to reach the top of the social ladder, to become a hero from being a zero, to grow from rags to riches. Some individuals like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Job, Bill Gates and Jack Ma, have done it in lesser time. Can we honestly say this about our state of Meghalaya? Looking back at the past half a century of our state’s existence, we note with concerns the sluggish pace of development that we witness up to now. We could enumerate a lot of examples to demonstrate this statement.
When it comes to economic equity, the state of Meghalaya has failed miserably. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened scandalously. There are individuals who own thousand acres of land while there are many families who still live in rented homes because they own not even an inch of land. There are families who could spend crores of rupees giving quality education to their children while there are poor families who cannot afford even Rs. 500 of monthly school fees and as a consequence school dropout is on the rise. There are people who could spend lavishly on extravagant weddings and parties while there are many families who could hardly afford a square meal a day. There are families who could provide comfortable transport to their children going to school and colleges but there are thousands of poor children in rural areas who still walk on foot for kilometers daily in order to reach their schools. We could cite many more examples of this sort just to demonstrate how deep is the economic divide in our state. This is certainly not a sign of development or progress. We should feel ashamed of this situation in our state. A tribal community that used to be characterized by collective well-being and prosperity has transformed into a capitalist society where the rich thrive and the poor rot.
Turning our attention to public development in terms of infrastructure and opportunities, Meghalaya’s performance is pathetic. The road condition in Shillong for example, has remained unchanged except for re-routing of traffic from time to time as a sort of time pass for the traffic department. In the last ten years Guwahati has seen scores of flyovers to ease traffic congestion, instead in Shillong we only dream about them. While the volume of traffic has increased tremendously, the road condition has remained the same. The absence of adequate public infrastructure like road connectivity, rail and air connectivity etc, has repelled big investors and economic players from within or from outside the country. While other states of India have seen the entry of many big international companies, our state has remained neglected. The adverse consequence of this is evidently scarcity of jobs. More and more of our youth are getting educated and qualified but there are no jobs for them. No wonder thousands of educated youth are seen queuing at every employment centre. Many times for a single job vacancy there would be at least five hundred applicants. In desperation many of our youth have left the state in search of jobs in other parts of the country which means a brain-drain for the state.
It is a matter of shame for the state that half a century has passed and we are yet to get a state university, a state medical college or a state engineering college and so on. While Assam has a number of state universities, Meghalaya is still surviving on a single central university. If our state has a deficit of doctors, engineers and other professionals, it is precisely because we lack such professional institutes. Consequently, only children of rich families could afford to give professional education to their children outside the state while children of poor families (intelligent though they may be) are forced to terminate their education at graduation level. When it comes to rural development, our state should hang its head in shame. Our border issues are still unresolved for fifty years now and we are witnessing the adverse consequences of that. The disparity between the urban and the rural areas in the state is so evident in terms of roads and transport, communication, educational and health infrastructures etc. No wonder, there is a constant migration of people from rural areas to the city, adding more to the woes of congestion. When it comes to sports, the youth of our state are left high and dry with no opportunities to develop their skills and talents. When will Meghalaya produce Olympians like Manipur or Assam? We have inborn talents in archery, but there is no infrastructure to provide professional training to such youth. Thus our people end up using their traditional bows and arrows at some local competitions. The preparation for the National Games which is supposed to take place in 2022, does not seem to see the light of day. The state does not have sufficient infrastructure for such mega events and the few that we have are sub-standard. Thus thousands of talents in sports and games are left untapped and wasted.
In the recent NITI Aayog survey done in 2021, Meghalaya ranks 5th in the list of poorest states of India. This is a matter of shame for the whole state and especially for our leaders and governments. Different governments have come and gone in the last fifty years and the state is only regressing and soon enough we may take the first place in the list of poorest states. There is much soul searching to be done by every political party in the state including every stakeholder in the governance of the state. We hope and pray that the present as well as the future governments will wake up from their day-dreaming and start acting responsibly to take the state forward and not backwards in development and progress. Long live Meghalaya!