By Patricia Mukhim
As we approach the new year which is just two months away from now guess what our conversations tend to veer towards. No prizes for guessing though. So immersed is the average Meghalaya in the politics of the day that every conversation, especially at homes of the bereaved where men congregate in the living room of the deceased, automatically drifts towards the State Assembly election 2023 and its outcome. Two or three months ago people discussed the infamous crash of the dome atop the ‘now under construction’ Meghalaya Assembly building. That building was supposed to be inaugurated before the elections and would have been another feather in the hats covering many bald heads but the dome crashed and one of the likely reasons is substandard building materials used that were unable to take the weight of the dome.
We Khasis are great believers in the meta-physical even today. From jem daw to jem rngiew ( degeneration of the human life force) to ‘ka sabuit ka sakai’ (someone casting the evil eye) to several other indigenous beliefs. The reasons for the dome collapse would at one time have been subject to “ka knia ka khan” – a sort of divination to pin-point the reason behind the infamous incident. But no such thing was resorted to because we now know the reason full well. It is plain and simple corruption. Indeed corruption is so embedded in society that there is no need for any divination to tell us the reason for the dome collapse. From a letter that appeared in this newspaper by a writer who is evidently an insider to the system, we have a long list of reasons showing how there has been abdication of duty and responsibility by the PWD (Buildings) and the different committees formed in order to oversee the construction of the “sanctum sanctorum of democracy.”
So while the fallen dome was a hot topic for about two months it has now slipped into the zone of ‘forgetting.’ People no longer link the dome collapse to one of the major scams of the MDA Government. And if we care to analyse things meticulously we would have realized that Conrad Sangma the Chief Executive of Meghalaya Incorporated has been able to get away with every scam by setting up frivolous enquiry committees whose reports we already know will acquit the Government and make fools of all of us in the media who call out corruption. By the time we arrive at the campaign period there would be so much song, dance and noise that gullible voters would have deleted all those scams from their memory banks. They will instead start dancing to the tunes of the bards and the paid singers who can construct foot-tapping melodies (ki jingrwai pynshongshit), depending on how much they are paid. Since we are a people that are easily (mis) led by good music, unbridled expressions of love for the candidate of our choices, joy- rides, picnics, excursions, free uniforms for football teams, money splurged on sports clubs, money distributed to destitute women on several pretexts as a one-time gift and so on and so forth, scams are just a blot in the distant past.
For those few concerned citizens who care to think of ‘mundane’ stuff as a long-term economic vision, employment policy, a health and nutrition policy, educational policy, the future appears bleak since these will not feature in the election manifestos of any political party. Or if they do appear we the people will not have an opportunity to ask them to spell out how to make good their promises. Hence those who desire change after every election tend to slip into that zone of “Learned Helplessness,” a term borrowed from David CM Carter’s book ‘Breakthrough.’ Carter says “Learned helplessness is the condition that most people live in. They believe ‘nothing will get better’ or ‘it’s all pointless’ or ‘it doesn’t matter what I do, it won’t make any difference.’ If we slip into this ‘learned helplessness’ syndrome the result is cynicism and sarcasm both of which never did anyone any good.
So between now and February 2023 perhaps we could start with community conversations, something we hardly do even when society is passing through some of its most tormenting times. A society where people can share their thoughts and have deep conversations about everything that is happening around us and not just about politics will emerge stronger and be able to bring the desired change. An empowered citizenry is a threat to politicians. They want citizens to be dependent, subservient and always needing help, hence they won’t fix what’s going wrong. This is what needs to be addressed. Health Centres ( Sub-Centres, PHCs, CHCs) have to function responsibly and the doctor in charge should be held accountable. Take the example of Assam. Chief Minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma has the habit of making a surprise appearance at PHCs and CHCs or Government hospitals. If he finds something amiss then immediate action is taken against those found guilty of dereliction of duty. So much so, these days doctors are scared of being absent without leave and make it a point to be present at their work stations. Compare this to Meghalaya where doctors still visit the PHCs and CHCs only on market days, which is once a week.
Recently I visited the PHC at Lawbah and was happy to see a young resident doctor present there. He is a young, enthusiastic doctor wanting to give his best but lacks the wherewithal, such as trained professionals to run the X-Ray and blood testing labs. How many times has our Health Minister made a surprise visit to Shillong Civil Hospital without his baggage of entourage? It is fine for politicians to give good speeches but what is needed is action – action not for effect or for a media blitzkrieg but to correct systems that have gone wrong. And the health system in Meghalaya just like the education system has gone horribly wrong. Whereas in the Health Department we have a hyper-active bureaucracy that is trying to right the wrongs of decades, in the education sector not much is heard about correcting the systemic wrongs.
It is also time for the people of Meghalaya to take stock of governance and to ask why the State needs to hire consultants for every sphere of public governance. Meghalaya can rightly be named a Paradise for Consultants. In fact Meghalaya is a ‘Consultocracy,’ a term coined in the early 1990s by Hood and Jackson (1991). It has since been defined as a process, “whereby non-elected consultants are replacing political debate conducted by publicly accountable politicians” (Craig & Brooks, 2006). Are Consultants more knowledgeable than the local people – scholars, academicians, researchers and village communities? What actually needs to be fixed is the governance process. Every level of the bureaucratic hierarchy has to be on the ground, seeing matters from close quarters instead of being holed up in the Secretariat.
Consultants cannot fix governance deficits. As private providers of knowledge and expert services, consultants have brought fundamental changes to the ways in which public administrations handle information and knowledge. When contracting out expert services, publicly owned and available information (or information that could, in principle, be publicly owned) is transformed into a private commodity. Therefore, information that is frequently used by public administrations (such as computer programs, algorithms, benchmarking data, and indicators) becomes an asset for private consulting firms. This ownership may result in information advantages for consultants and result in state dependency on them followed by rent-seeking behaviour by consultants.
Consultocracy in public administration weakens accountability. According to the traditional conception of politics, civil servants are accountable to the government, the government is accountable to the parliament, and the parliament is accountable to the people. The growing role of consultants distorts this idealized conception of accountability in ways that go beyond the larger role of expertise and technocracy in politics. Research on consultocracy suggests that consultants have become powerful because, when the new managerialist model that they advocate is implemented it tends to remove public administration from politics and thus, from public scrutiny.
We have been paying several hundred crores to consultants even in the area of sports almost as if Meghalaya is a baby needing constant care-giving and feeding by consultants. One important election agenda should be to reduce if not remove the consultants completely and put the crores paid to them to better use. A Government that does not have faith in its own people’s intelligence and capability has no right to rule.