Bordering on Darkness in Meghalaya

By Manosh Das

Shillong, Jul 30 : "At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom." This was India's first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's dream for the nation as projected by him in his famed speech Tryst With Destiny' on the eve of Independence.

And though governments have come and gone and India has been purported to shine', there are citizens of this great country who have been left in the darkness, quite literally.

Even after sixty years of the Partition and 39 years of attaining statehood, villages along the India-Bangladesh border languish in darkness with most of them having no electricity.

Bringing this dark fact to light, a 15-member delegation comprising headmen of 50 odd villages along the 70-km stretch from Mawpyllun to Khonjoi-Maheskola along the international border knocked the doors of the government Wednesday to apprise the state of their plight.

"We are still lying in darkness without electricity. We too deserve to live in the light of the modern world; our school-going children deserve to live and study and achieve like other children of the state," said a memorandum submitted to home minister HDR Lyngdoh by the delegation under the banner of Synjuk ki Rangbah Shnong, Border Area. "Our region has been totally neglected due to which our children cannot read or write properly and become doctors, engineers, lecturers or big officers," the memo went on.

The village headman brought to the notice of the government yet another surprising fact the government has put up signboards claiming that around 50 border villages in the West Khasi Hills have been electrified under the Rajiv Gandhi Gramin Rojgar Yojana Electrification Scheme, while the reality is that there is not a single electric post in any of these villages, leave alone total electrification'.

The memorandum complained that the villagers are unable to set up even small-scale industries due to lack of electricity, and added that this has adversely affected the economic progress of the entire stretch along the Indo-Bangla border.

"The people have been left to fend for themselves as there are no proper roads, no workable healthcare, no facilities for education, and there does not even exist a rural water supply scheme or adequate police outposts for maintaining security and law and order in the border villages," a member of the delegation, Nasar Marwein, told reporters after meeting the home minister.

The home minister, meanwhile, is understood to have assured the border representatives that he would look into their problems in earnest.