THE North-east states, with their limited potential for revenue generation, have to take an annual trip to Delhi with their well-polished begging bowls to prostrate themselves before members of the Planning Commission. In this annual rigmarole, the Planning Commission pretends to grill the chief ministers and bureaucrats and challenge their facts and figures. But that done, the presiding deities in the Commission ultimately comply with the demands of the states, subtracting a few crores of rupees here and there. And then the teams return to their respective states announcing that they have been able to wrest so many thousand crores of rupees from the Commission. In the North-east, this make news and the political parties in power make this a major media event.
This time the Meghalaya team led by DD Lapang (who within this state of the “megh” is addressed as Dr because he has double honorary doctorates in divinity) managed to get Rs 2,100 crore for the plan budget from the Planning Commission. One was appalled that the Planning Commission did not even tick off the entourage from Meghalaya for being the second from the bottom in so far as the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is concerned. The state has no figures for the Maternal Mortality Ratio, which is a critical indicator for the state of health among women in the reproductive years.
When this writer asked the health department why Meghalaya had never been able to collect authentic data on the MMR, the reply given was that the state banked on the data of the National Family Health Survey, which placed Meghalaya’s MMR at 327 per 100,000 births in 2007-08.
Last year, at the meeting of the Meghalaya State Planning Board, an official of the health department conjured the magic MMR figure of 450 per 100,000 births. Where he got that figure from is anybody’s guess. And then in another pious announcment Meghalaya says it will bring down the MMR figure to 100 by 2015.
To say that all this is bureacratic buffooning is an understatement. But in Meghalaya figures don’t mean anything. They are simply figures that no one cares about and no one contests. They become part of the state’s economic history and after a while the statistics are mere pieces of paper to be shredded, except that we do not even have shredding machines, so they are either sold off to the kabariwallah or are consigned to the bonfires of our blighted history.
There are so many projects that have been conceived more than two decades ago and have remained incomplete. A striking example is that of the Shillong bypass which is aimed at diverting all heavy traffic, mainly the coal-carrying trucks, away from the main city thoroughfare. Every day on an average about 600 trucks go down from Shillong to Guwahati during the peak season and a little less than that during the leaner months. Trucks coming from Guwahati and traversing Shillong to go onwards to Silchar and Mizoram number about 350 per day. These trucks carry foodgrains and hardware material. Over and above this number, there are also oil and LPG tankers that negotiate the hairpin bends of Shillong city over pot-holed roads often perched so precariously that they threaten to topple over. Several accidents have occurred because unloaded trucks coming up from Guwahati just hurtle along at breakneck speed.
Shillong is the only state capital through which heavily loaded trucks cut through the heart of the city, making life miserable for pedestrians and small car drivers. In a way, this is a human rights violation and the government ought to have been hauled over the coals. But an apathetic populace grits its teeth and bears the brunt of a non-delivering, non-functioning government. We are all inured by the daily scenes of grisly accidents. The other day, a biker who was crushed to death by a bus in the heart of the city died on the spot and his body remained unclaimed on the road for over an hour. People passed by, took photographs and went on their way. The blood and brains had gone dry, but 108, the emergency service van, came an hour later only after some kind souls removed the body to the local civil hospital.
Coming back to the MMR figures, the Planning Commission made some stray reference to the fact that Meghalaya had a dash instead of a figure in the MMR column. When the principal secretary, Planning, was asked why this figure was absent, he said that the state did not have one. But the health secretary said the NFHS figures were provided so he couldn’t figure out why that was not included in the data on health. This is a small example of how the bureaucracy functions in Meghalaya and perhaps other states as well.
The reason one stresses on maternal mortality is because it is a useful indicator not only to capture the reproductive health status of women but because it also gives an idea of the reach and adequacy of maternal health services provided to women. Researchers aver that the scanty data available reveal that the level of MMR is still high. Since maternal deaths are statistically infrequent events, even in setting with high levels of mortality and fertility, household surveys require large sample sizes to derive at reliable estimates of MMR.
The Maternal Mortality Rate provides the indication of risk of maternal deaths among women of reproductive ages and is defined as the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 births among women aged 15-49 years. The Maternal Mortality Ratio, on the other hand, is defined as maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. It is well documented that the factors that give rise to maternal mortality are also those that give rise to infant mortality where maternal health is poor, both infant and maternal mortality are likely to be high. In other words, the Infant Mortality Rate for a given country or region is largely dependent on maternal health condition as reflected by the maternal mortality ratio of the region.
In Meghalaya, maternal mortality is caused mainly because of the lack of health care facilities in the rural areas. Nearly 85 per cent of women still give birth at home because institutional delivery is still a distant dream. Other causes include haemorrhage, malnutrition due to high fertility rates and other complications at birth. It is a matter that deserves the attention of the funding departments in Delhi that even the National Rural Health Mission has failed to take off in Meghalaya after nearly six years of its implementation.
Indeed, the key word here is “implementation”. Meghalaya does not come under the 73rd Amendment Act because Rajiv Gandhi wanted that exempted from the tribal states on the plea that they already had their tribal institutions. But the man behind the Panchayati Raj revolution in India never imagined that the tribal institutions were not capacitated to deliver governance. They are feudal institutions that are completely gender blind and are only good at fulfilling their old role of social policing and trying to keep a tab on social deviants. Times have changed but the roles of the traditional institutions have remained stuck in a time warp. If the local traditional institutions had reinvented themselves to take on the roles of development agencies, they would have made a clamour at the woeful absence of development in their areas and in the state. The fact that these institutions are blissfully unaware about that plethora of government schemes due to them shows that we are a long way away from gaining freedom from ignorance, illiteracy and, of course, poverty.
In Meghalaya, 49 per cent of the people live below the poverty line. That a tribal state which, prior to Independence, started off on a fairly strong economic footing backed by an egalitarian culture is now starkly divided into the haves and have-nots is surely a testimony that governance has failed miserably. How can the Planning Commission continue to fund Meghalaya without taking stock of the deteriorating rate of growth in the state? The National Highway linking Shillong to Guwahati is in a mess each time the skies pour out their vengeance. Is this what we call “development”? It is a different story that the politicians and bureaucrats have today become land sharks and realtors. And the Planning Commission’s blind habit of patronising these fat cats has only further compromised our collective fates.
The writer is editor, The Shillong Times, and can be contacted at
patricia17@rediffmail.com