Guwahati, Sep 25: Meghalaya Cabinet has cleared list of holidays for the year 2025 and there is no change in the list compared to the holidays list for 2024.
In the wake of retirement of non-judicial members in the Meghalaya Human Rights Commission (MHRC), the selection committee which is headed by the Chief Minister, proposed the name of retired IPS officer H Nongpluh, to be the non-judicial member in the MHRC. The Cabinet has approved the name.
For selection of candidate for the post Zila Sainik Officer Shillong, a committee headed by Chief Secretary, considered a panel of names and recommended the name of Lieutenant Colonel Sebastian Marbaniang who has been approved by the Cabinet.
Cabinet also discussed bringing about certain changes in certain rules pertaining to the Excise Department. The first rule that has been changed and provisions brought in is the concept of composite license. This is being done in view of different hotels and especially existing five-star hotels as well as the ones that will come up in the future, to give it a more structured system.
Earlier, the licenses given to the different hotels were based on the restaurant or the bars, which means that if a particular hotel had four bars or four restaurants, then they would have to take four different licenses for each of these restaurants or bars.
Now, the idea is to give one composite license to the entire entity so that they don’t have to apply for separate licenses and charges will be higher compared to normal bar licenses. This amendment was proposed by the Excise Department and the Cabinet has approved it, so proposal for composite license for hotels has been cleared today by the cabinet.
The cabinet also cleared the proposal by the Excise Department to have a QR code-based tracking system for the different products sold by the department, which in layman’s term means that every bottle sold in Meghalaya will have a QR code on it. This will help them to track the entire journey of the bottle so that they know exactly where or which shop it was supposed to be sold and if there was any leakage in the system, so this will help them to track the entire system.
The government is expecting that it will have anything between 5% to 10% of increase on overall revenue collection and leakage that they are being witnessed in today’s system will be plugged by use of QR code technology.