By Ellerine Diengdoh
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a government in possession of a crumbling education system must be in want of a scapegoat.
The Meghalaya Education Grant (MEG) discussion paper, is a 15 page odyssey that boldly attempts to fix everything, from Lower Primary to Higher Education, by treating the entire system like a single misbehaving child. This proposal assumes, what works for a six-year-old drawing a cow that looks like a helicopter, will work just as well for a 20-year-old trying to understand Heidegger’s thoughts on “being.” I mean, cows, helicopters, existential dread. It is all connected. Somehow.
Let us start with the basic premise. Colleges and schools are the same. One framework. For nursery rhymes and nuclear physics. The same reform must be applied to A for Apple and A for Aristotle. Which makes perfect sense if you’ve never read a book or met a child in your life.
The Paper expresses great concern about the Performance Grading Index (PGI) for schools. Fair. It then implies, we colleges should also prostrate ourselves before the PGI gods. That’s right—colleges, which have NAAC accreditation, may now be assessed AGAIN by a school-based index!
The proposal proceeds to ask the hard-hitting question: “Why do we have so many schools?”. A valid concern. But it fails to follow up with an equally important one: “Why do we have so few colleges?” Because once all those bright and beautiful school students graduate, where exactly are they supposed to go? Presumably, into the few crammed classrooms the state can offer. But don’t worry. They can queue. In shifts. Till doomsday. Or until they evaporate.
Now, to the part where the document gently suggests that aided college teachers are being paid obscene salaries. Obscene? Really? Last we checked, obscenity is defined as: Obscene (adj.) : So excessive as to be offensive. Likely examples would be:
1. Going on “educational” taxpayer-funded trips abroad
2. Skillfully embezzling public funds with a straight face, and
3. Retiring with a pension after a single, forgettable term in office.
Evidently, receiving a UGC-regulated salary for meeting UGC-required qualifications is now excessive. How dare people be qualified and paid accordingly? And the comparison with government college teachers? If you need reminding, the very few drawing the state scale, in government colleges, are those who don’t qualify for UGC scales. But why let a small thing like facts get in the way of a budget chart? One official reportedly said, “They get paid salaries just for talking. I talk all day in the Secretariat, and no one’s giving me a PhD”.
The paper gasps that Rs. 1,473.45 crore was spent on salaries for aided colleges—as if this was an unspeakable scandal! But that’s what the GIA scheme is literally for. Paying salaries. That’s like complaining that the fund for building a bridge was spent on cement, or blaming the cook because you spent your grocery money on curtains. If they want to expand funding for infrastructure too, that would be generous. But suggesting a salary cut to fund benches and toilets? Don’t you think that a little excessive?
There is also, in this magical proposal, the idea, that future funding could be performance-based. Which sounds promising, until you realise no one knows what “performance” means. If it means NAAC, we’re good. If it means actual teaching, we’ve been doing that. If it means enrolment, we’re bursting at the seams, teaching 5 sections of the same class. If it means student-teacher ratio, we are way beyond the permissible level. However, if it means trending online, we will start uploading cat-filter lectures immediately.
The chart also shows that more money goes to private-aided colleges than government colleges. Yes. Because most students are studying in private-aided colleges. Meghalaya currently has 6 government colleges and 44 GIA colleges. That’s like being shocked that more lunch was cooked at the canteen than at your own house. It is not a conspiracy. It’s pure and simple maths.
Meanwhile, students from other states keep pouring into our GIA colleges. Why? Maybe….just maybe…. our institutions and teaching are among the best. Or maybe their parents just have a wicked sense of humour….sending their kids somewhere with fewer distractions, or for character building in a Smart City that’s clever enough to forget electricity.
So, if private colleges are bearing the weight of the system, should they be supported “less”, or “more?” The government has the answer. Give them “less” money and “more” autonomy—so the blame slides downhill faster and with fewer administrative delays.
Private colleges are the fragile spine propping up a collapsing system, and the proposed “autonomy” is a guillotine disguised as freedom. As one weary teacher put it, “Autonomy? That’s just the state handing us a rope and saying, Dance for them—then hang yourself when they boo.”
Another official insightfully noted, “There are too many teacher associations. They should be one happy family.” Interesting take. The system itself has carved teachers into 14,000 categories. Releasing their salaries every solar eclipse. Why wouldn’t they form 25 associations? That’s not fragmentation. That’s self-defense.
What is also brilliant is the data accuracy in the proposal. The proposal says St. Mary’s College of Teacher Education has 2,310 students. It actually has 100. Perhaps someone accidentally added the population of a small village to the spreadsheet. Either way, this does raise the question, if one number is that far off, how many other “facts” in the report are doctored?
So what have we learned? That being a college teacher in Meghalaya means juggling endless tasks with no extra hands. It also means being overworked to the bone, being strangled by mountains of mindless red tape and regulations, invisible when things go right, and lightning rods when things go wrong. We’re also the scapegoats, the default villains, the punchlines of every failed plan, and when the system creaks and collapses, the first question shouted at us is always, “What were the teachers doing?”
In conclusion, I can only say: “Those who can, teach. Those who can’t, write discussion papers.” But that would be unfair. Because writing a paper that manages to combine school-level indicators with higher education policy, confuse infrastructure with salaries, misquote data, misrepresent facts, and still claim reform in a single breath? That’s not easy.
Should the authors of the MEG proposal get a raise?
Depends. What’s their PGI score?