Given the unfortunate criteria the media sets for news value, it was not such a bad idea for Meghalaya to have stayed out of the national headlines. But maybe it was also not so good to have stayed out of national (read New Delhi’s) focus altogether. Or it wouldn’t have been so easy for these half dozen monstrosities to offend your eyes and nostrils as you enter the bend into the green hills from Guwahati, hoping to catch the cool Meghalaya breeze — after nearly 25 years, last week, in my case. Instead of the untouched green hills, the skyline of the foothills town of Byrnihat is now dominated by a half dozen smoking chimneys of factories making, believe it or not, specialty bricks and ferro-alloys. Now, who the hell allowed these to come up in Meghalaya of all places? They contribute nothing to the state by way of revenue, jobs, or even consumer needs. So why base such polluting and CO2-spewing, power-guzzling factories in a hill state when Assam’s plains beckon just five miles downhill?

I am told these were permitted in the past (mostly by Congress governments) on the argument that Meghalaya had surplus power! And how much is the state’s total generation, almost all from its rain-fed lakes? Just 300 megawatts! It looked surplus mainly because of economic backwardness, so its two million plus people could not even use this much power (by comparison, last summer Delhi’s peak demand was 4030 MW). Now these factories vacuum-clean so much of its power that even Shillong has power cuts. New concrete buildings coming up all over Shillong have that shocking appendage to their terraces we have got so used to in Delhi — the diesel gen-sets. So you go out for a nightly stroll and smell diesel in the most brilliant, cool and moist breeze God created, the rustle of pines drowned in the hum of “silent” gen-sets.

... contd.