SHILLONG, March 27: TMC senior MLA, Mukul M. Sangma on Monday advised the government to be accountable, transparent, and corruption-free enough to avoid any intervention from the judiciary. The duty of the government is to ensure efficiency and transparency in governance, he said in the Assembly.
Urging the state government to use laws in the right perspective, he said: “Meghalaya was lauded for being one of the first states to come up with pieces of legislation for not just the auditing of programmes and policies through government agencies but also through the involvement of the communities.”
Reminding the government of the Meghalaya Community Participation and Public Services Social Audit Act of 2017, he said it was operationalised by constituting the Meghalaya Society for Social Audit based on the desire of the people.
He said Meghalaya was one of the few states to have RTI and Lokayukta and urged the state government to strengthen these institutions to convey that everyone can be under the scanner. He lamented that the Lokayukta has not been provided with enough support by the government.
Sangma said there seems to be no fear of the law while implementing various programmes in recent years. “I hope the government takes cognisance of the general concern and takes necessary measures,” he added.
He said the government should tackle irregularities in a manner that the judiciary does not have to pull up the executive. He gave the example of the High Court of Meghalaya directing the government to let the CISF regulate the movement of coal-laden trucks and not the Meghalaya police via the CRPF.
“Therefore, the government of the day has to take corrective measures,” he said.
Referring to a report of retired judge B.P. Katakey saying the total volume of coal across the coal-bearing districts may not be more than 19 lakh metric tonnes and not 32 metric tonnes as claimed, Sangma said the government should find out where the rest of the coal has gone.
He lauded the government for the Meghalaya Health Insurance Scheme but said a patient covered by it invariably spends much more than expected.
“It is because the department and the government failed to work out the cost of treatment for different kinds of ailments. The smart card (given with the scheme) is like a blank cheque and if this is the way we implement, it will become unsustainable,” he said.
Reminding that he was one of the authors of the programme, he urged the government to review it and go for a course correction.
The TMC leader also touched upon the issues faced by the farmers of the state. Prime among them is the procurement of pest-attack-prone planting materials from outside the state with the farmers of the Garo Hills having been affected the most.
Stating that the farmers are victims of middlemen and manipulation, he pointed out that the resources under the MITP programme approved in 2017 have been not been utilised to enable the farmers to have access to the markets.
Sangma also touched up the incomplete projects under the PMGSY although contractors do not face the problem of militancy these days. “We have to take these up with the Ministry of Rural Development and the World Bank in order to ensure the villages do not remain deprived,” he said.
“Programmes such as JJM and Saubhagya have failed too,” he added.
“There are concerns over a number of cases pertaining to implementation of the Saubhagya or JJM. There are villages who have been beneficiaries of the programmes but the actual benefit is not there because these programmes have failed to deliver,” he said.
He said that pipelines have been laid under JJM but there is no water supply.
Mukul pointed out to another lacuna in JJM saying that people were suppose to be one of the parties drawing up the programme but they were never engaged. They were only told to sign on the paper.
Talking about Saubhagya, he said transformers that were installed were damaged within one or two months.
“Let us look at these areas which are our priority keeping in mind that the digitalization of education and other things require constant power supply,” he added.
“In war-torn Ukraine, power was restored within 48 hours and we are a peaceful state,” he said, adding that a number of villages have fallen victim to delay in restoration of power supply in the event of damage to transformers.
