By Patricia Mukhim
The Chief Minister of Meghalaya, Conrad Sangma is a self-confessed manager. He learnt entrepreneurial management from Wharton School of Business, University of Penn and completed his MBA in Finance from Imperial College London. He would have done very well in the corporate world. Alas Conrad got into politics and is turning Meghalaya into a corporation. Conrad manages the government as he would have done his own company. The problem is that the shareholders of this company are poor Meghalayans. The bureaucrat closest to Conrad who assists him in managing this company is Dr D Vijay Kumar with whom he shares a rare bonhomie who is by far the most qualified IAS officer. Vijay Kumar has a PhD in Public Policy from the Blatnavik School of Government, University of Oxford. His Doctorate was in the field of economics of education. Vijay Kumar’s research was on evaluating the impact of India’s national school choice policy on children’s outcomes and investigating related questions, central to the theoretical and empirical debates on school choice in developing countries. That’s some top-notch research and if Meghalaya Government went by his qualifications they would have asked him to manage the Education Department which is in deep shambles. I am sure Dr Vijay Kumar’s expertise would have helped Meghalaya’s poor educational indices improve but Conrad thought otherwise.
As of today, Dr Vijay Kumar is the CEO who manages the not-for-profit Company called the Meghalaya Basin Management Agency MBMA) that has given birth to several verticals. What started off as the Meghalaya Basin Development Authority has now metamorphosed into a corporate entity. MBMA is incorporated under the Planning Department of the Government of Meghalaya and claims to be engaged in the implementation of specialised development projects focused on enhancement of natural resource management, access to finance, livelihood development, enterprise promotion, market linkages, and knowledge services. To coin the right words and phrases the Government engages consultants like KPMG, a British-Dutch multinational professional services network and one of the Big Four accounting organizations who allegedly also manage the Chief Minister’s social media accounts. In short, KPMG’s duty is to make the government look good. One can only make a wild guess as to the amount paid to these global consultants and where the resources are drawn from.
MBMA implements projects that are received as loans from IFAD, World Bank, Asian Development Bank and any other lenders. The IFAD supported project called Megha-LAMP claims to double the incomes of farmers and improve their quality of life through focused, market oriented interventions in 1350 villages. The World Bank has funded a project called Community -Led Landscape Management Project(CLLMP). The objective of this project is to focus on strengthening community capacities for managing natural resources through a landscape approach. By now the community should have been empowered enough to come forward to prevent rampant coal and limestone mining in their areas as both these activities have devastated the environment. But no such thing has happened. The crore-pati mine owners continue to bring down forests at will because according to Meghalaya Forest Department’s definition of forest there are no more forests in the state. This makes one wonder where the CLLMP is working and if it is working at all. Till date we haven’t heard of a single community that has reclaimed barren lands and greened them up on their own initiative and with the help of the CLLMP funds.
With no one to monitor how these projects are actually executed on the ground and with very little community participation, one if left wondering whether the bald landscape has now turned green. The World Bank or ADB as lender does not care what Meghalaya does with the money as long as the loan is repaid with interest. In fact, MBMA becomes an easy place to park money and to spend on buying top model vehicles and other luxury items such as state of the art furniture and televisions with humungous screens for the higher-ups. Even newly-appointed IAS officers have learnt that in Meghalaya they are the actual rulers and they demand I-phones, I-pads, vehicles as their entitlements.
The MBMA actually makes tall claims of facilitating Community-led sustainable Natural Resource Management planning; Development of strong and resilient village economies, and Capacity Building and Training apart from enabling financial services to farmers and linking them to supply chains and also extending financial literacy. Above all the MBMA claims to build the marketing capacity of farmers and producers through inclusive supply chain development, enterprise promotion and market linkage; promotion of market driven entrepreneurship by developing a robust enabling eco-system etc. The problem with nice-sounding words and jargons is that they are not understood by the stakeholders on the ground for whom even the word entrepreneur runs into several words in Khasi (U/ka nongsdang trei kam lajong). I am not sure how this would translate into Garo. Besides we don’t even have examples of such entrepreneurs and nor have we heard their success stories barring Smoky Falls coffee which is a bank-financed start-up and the Lakadong turmeric enterprise which is now run by local firms with some hand-holding from the Agriculture Department, courtesy some committed officers who work quietly and don’t flaunt their success stories.
The IAS is a brothers-in arms fraternity that has one another’s back so it is futile to expect anyone to blow the whistle on another. The rot will be allowed to carry on and erode the state completely until the bottom is completely scraped.
So much for the elite services but why do politicians dance to their tunes? Politicians represent the hopes and dreams of the people that elect them. Bureaucrats are doing a job for which they are more than compensated for. In a state where 37% are living below poverty line (BPL) the elite service officers are living it up with a private gym for training; a lighted stadium for them to run around (a grim reminder of the Delhi Principal Secretary Sanjeev Khirwar who walks his dog in the Thyagaraj stadium and therefore athletes have to complete their training by 7 pm).This is the level of entitlement expected by civil “servants” who have ironically succeeded in turning us the people into their servants. Actually, it is politicians who should put these (un)civil servants in their place but they have failed to do so because most of them are so illiterate about governance that they rely heavily on these civil servants for wisdom.
What happened on Sunday last when the dome over the Assembly building collapsed is also a sign of the times. There is complete collapse of morality not just among bureaucrats (many of who are here for a tenure and for as long as it suits them after which they will go where the grass is greener in Delhi or their own home states) but also among our local technocrats who shamelessly cavort with political parties even before they have retired. The kind of theft of public goods in Meghalaya is abominable. And this is not recent. It has gone on for as long as the state was born. The PHE scandal happened in the early years of statehood but till date not a single person has been punished for daylight corruption.
Even now the inquiries into different scams have not been made public. A lot depends on how the enquiry was conducted and by whom. We the people are facing a crisis of confidence that we have not faced ever before. Meghalaya today stands as an example of a state run by a triumvirate of business, politics and bureaucracy. The people with whom the real power vests, do not feature anywhere in the scheme of things. Meghalaya today has become a family estate and politics an entitlement. There is need for a monumental shake-up. Will 2023 bring that shake-up?
As a state we face a strategic catastrophe. A cul-de-sac has been created from where there are no good avenues of easy departure. After all the scams that have blown up on our faces, a senior leader of the UDP told me that his party will do much better this time because there are so many lining up for party tickets for the 2023 election. The NPP too has become a haven for many refuge seekers. Does this mean that people are still going to vote with their eyes closed to all the scams? Only time will tell!
Let’s see if the shareholders in Meghalaya Inc rise up to claim their share of the pie that has so long been the privilege of the ruling class!