Meghalaya’s former Chief Minister, Mukul Sangma has gone hammer and tongs at the MDA Government’s handling of the tragic disappearance of a tourist couple in the Sohra region. The newly married couple from Indore who last stayed at a homestay in the Nongriat Double Decker Living Root Bridge, disappeared on May 23 and the dead body of the husband was only found on June 2 in a gorge in Sohra Rim area. region. The wife – Sonam Raghuvanshi is still untraced. Considering that Meghalaya is now in the eye of the storm, Mukul Sangma could have reserved his ammunition for another day and not launched an attack on the Government at a time when all guns are trained at the people of the state. The word, “crime prone hills,” is a huge disservice to Meghalaya as a whole and to the Sohra region in particular and at this juncture all elected representative should be standing together to pool their resources on how best to find the missing woman because until she is found there are speculations galore.
This is no time to score political brownie points; instead, the Opposition parties too should offer their suggestions to the government without making a spectacle of the sad event. To put the blame on drug users and to claim that a system for smooth conduct of tourism, including security measures was put in place during Dr Mukul Sangma’s time and that everything was allowed to collapse is hyperbolic. Dr Mukul Sangma is critical not only of how the tourism sector is being run but he also disapproves of the present government’s attempt to run it on a private-public-partnership (PPP) mode. Why not sit across the table and discuss the pros and cons of the medical college being run on PPP mode instead of trading charges through the media. Meghalaya should look around at the status of state medical colleges in the North Eastern states.
Mizoram got its first state medical college in 2018. Five years later, it tried to offload it onto the centre. The college has been facing both funding and faculty shortages and hence the Government wanted the centre to take care of the management of the medical college. However, the central government has rejected this on the plea that the institutes in the North Eastern states have different seat distribution patterns where 85% of the seats are distributed among the eight states. Faculty shortage is something that will likely become a problem in the Tura Medical College too since young doctor faculty would also look at the kind of education system and other facilities available in Tura for their children vis a vis the other cities. The Government of Meghalaya would struggle to run this medical college on its own, loaded as it is with several other responsibilities to manage even basic educational facilities. Like the Mizoram Medical College, it would struggle to find both resources and faculty. Pragmatism demands that problems be minutely dissected so as to avoid future bottlenecks.
