This is not to lay the fault for tourism gone awry at the doorstep of the MDA Government. There was no Tourism Policy until 2011. The state was created in 1972. It took the Government 39 long years to come up with a Tourism Policy. Not that Meghalaya had any policy before that. The State Health Policy came up in 2021 and Education Policy in 2018. So Meghalaya was literally running on auto-pilot mode and no one was any the wiser. For decades those running the government did not bother to think of policies for every aspect of human development. And neither did those in the Opposition ever demand that Meghalaya should have a policy for those key areas of human development so that fund allocation is prioritised rather than skewed.
Those leading Meghalaya since its statehood should have outlined the priority areas such as education, health, roads, water supply, and electricity, to name a few. Within the first five years after statehood the government should have envisioned Meghalaya's enormous tourism potential and created a master plan for the kind of tourism it envisaged which should not have been the mass tourism we see today. Those running the government were only interested in holding on to their chairs and left the state to bureaucrats who decided the development priorities for Meghalaya. As expected, those priorities changed every five years when a new set of politicians were elected. The price for this lack of a long term vision for the state is being paid by the present generation. The MDA Government is playing catch-up and has a lot to achieve to make up for the years of sleep-walking.
The slogan for this year's World Tourism Day is "Digital Agenda and Artificial Intelligence to Redesign Tourism." This agenda was set by the United Nations. It is essentially a western agenda that does not match the kind of tourism practised here. The first question to ask is: How can tourism serve Meghalaya and not how Meghalaya can serve tourism. Hence the Meghalaya Government should have come up with its own state-specific slogan to observe World Tourism Day instead of just repeating what the West prescribes. Those promoting tourism in Meghalaya and the government need to sit together and sort out a few thorny issues. Meghalaya has to decide what it does not want tourism to become. Its time to ask hard questions. These questions are - Who owns tourism; who controls it and who benefits from tourism. Tourism in Meghalaya will only be sustainable if it follows the high value, low volume model such as the one Bhutan adopts. In Bhutan people respect silence and demand that silence from visitors. In Meghalaya the tourist decides how he/she behaves because the state has not set out a code of conduct for tourists. How can 20-30 people stand and pose for pictures on a living root bridge without it fraying at the edges? But there is no one to regulate tourism on the ground. The tour guides are too polite and have not been trained to insist on ethical tourist behaviour and to respect the wonders of nature such as the waterfalls, rivers, canyons etc. Meghalaya's tourism model should be "high value, low volume" and one which is truly community-owned.