Editor,
Through the columns of your esteemed newspaper, I wish to draw attention to an often-overlooked strength of Meghalaya’s healthcare system, the consistently strong performance of our government-run Primary Health Centres (PHCs) and Community Health Centres (CHCs).
Across many parts of India, public primary healthcare facilities continue to struggle with inadequate services, poor maintenance, and declining public trust. In contrast, Meghalaya’s PHCs and CHCs function as dependable first points of care, even in geographically challenging and remote areas. Outreach services, regular village health and nutrition days, and mobile medical units have ensured that healthcare reaches communities that would otherwise remain underserved.
One of the most noticeable and commendable aspects of these facilities is their cleanliness and maintenance. Many PHCs and CHCs in the state are well-kept, hygienic, and orderly, an achievement that significantly enhances patient confidence and safety. Clean labour rooms, outpatient areas, and immunisation spaces reflect a system that values dignity and quality of care, often surpassing conditions seen in public health facilities elsewhere in the country.
The dedication of healthcare personnel also deserves recognition. Doctors, nurses, ANMs, ASHAs, and other frontline workers routinely go beyond their formal responsibilities to ensure continuity of care, particularly in maternal and child health services, immunisation, tuberculosis control, and non-communicable disease screening. Despite resource constraints, services remain functional and responsive.
Equally important is the strong community trust in government health institutions. Unlike in many states where public facilities are bypassed in favour of private providers, PHCs and CHCs in Meghalaya continue to serve as the backbone of healthcare delivery. This trust is built through culturally sensitive care, communication in local languages, and sustained engagement with communities.
While challenges remain, especially in specialist availability and advanced diagnostics it is vital to acknowledge what is working well. Meghalaya’s experience demonstrates that effective, clean, and people-centred public healthcare is achievable through good governance, decentralised planning, and a committed workforce.
Recognising and strengthening these successes will not only benefit the state but also offer valuable lessons for public health systems across the country.
Yours etc.,
Adrialli Mary Lyngdoh
Via email
Meghalaya is failing its youth in ways the developed world abandoned decades ago
Editor,
Let us stop pretending that Meghalaya’s failure in sports and youth development is abstract, accidental, or unavoidable. It is departmental, identifiable, and sustained. More importantly, it is outdated. What Meghalaya continues to neglect is something the developed world resolved decades ago: that sports policy is not entertainment policy, but education, health, and social policy combined.
In developed countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia etc., sports is governed through binding national and sub-national policies. These policies fix responsibility, ring-fence funding, integrate sports into school curricula, mandate community playgrounds, and link public health and youth welfare directly to structured physical activity. As a result, sports infrastructure does not depend on political moods, and youth development does not collapse between elections.
Meghalaya, by contrast, continues without a binding State Sports Policy, allowing responsibility to dissolve across departments while youth pay the price.
The Department of Sports & Youth Affairs has presided over unfinished stadiums, abandoned playgrounds, unused budget allocations, and the absence of any structured grassroots athlete pathway. In developed systems, such failures would trigger audits, resignations, or legislative scrutiny. In Meghalaya, they are normalised because no policy exists to impose consequences. Athletes are forced to crowd-fund survival while the department claims intent without delivery.
The Department of Education continues to treat sports as dispensable. In countries like the UK and Germany, physical education is compulsory, professionally staffed, and assessed, because it is understood that discipline, resilience, and mental health are inseparable from learning. In Meghalaya’s government schools, trained Physical Education teachers are missing, playfields are unsafe or absent, and sports periods are sacrificed without consequence. This is not modern governance; it is educational regression.
The Department of Social Welfare confronts youth drug addiction largely through awareness programmes, ignoring what developed countries treat as settled policy: sustained sports engagement as a primary tool of prevention, rehabilitation, and social reintegration. Australia and several European states embed sports within youth justice, mental health, and rehabilitation frameworks. Meghalaya leaves this potential untapped, not due to ignorance, but due to the absence of inter-departmental coordination enforced by policy.
The Department of Industries and Commerce, along with regulatory authorities, has allowed coke oven plants, cement factories, and other pollution-intensive industries to operate without structured obligation to contribute to sports development in affected communities. In developed economies, industrial social responsibility is geographically targeted and tightly regulated. In Meghalaya, CSR is allowed to drift elsewhere because the State refuses to anchor it within a State Sports Policy. Communities that bear the environmental and social costs of industrialisation receive no compensatory investment in youth development. This is not corporate generosity failing—it is regulation failing.
The constitutional implications are unambiguous. The Supreme Court of India has consistently held that the right to life under Article 21 includes dignity, health, and holistic development, and that education under Article 21A includes conditions necessary for physical growth and safety. Developed countries operationalise these principles through enforceable policy. Meghalaya merely acknowledges them in speeches. This is no longer a failure of coordination. It is a failure of will.
Meghalaya does not need another announcement, festival, or symbolic gesture. It needs what developed societies already understand as non-negotiable: a binding State Sports Policy that assigns responsibility to departments, fixes timelines, enforces accountability, integrates sports into education and welfare, and compels industrial contribution in regions from which industries profit.
Until such a policy exists, departments will continue to deflect blame, industries will continue to free-ride, and youth will continue to lose futures—not because Meghalaya lacks talent, but because it refuses to govern like a modern State.
This is no longer about vision. It is about accountability. Either the Government of Meghalaya legislates, enforces, and owns a State Sports Policy now—or it must accept responsibility for remaining behind a world that moved on long ago.
Yours etc.,
Forwardman Nongrem,
South West Khasi Hills
