By Aaron Laloo
On most mornings now, if you drive through parts of Meghalaya that once felt almost still, you notice small changes that didn’t exist a few years ago. A newly painted homestay sign outside a family home. A local driver waiting for tourists headed to a nearby waterfall. A café run by someone barely in their twenties. None of it feels dramatic on its own, but together, it signals something shifting beneath the surface.
For a long time, opportunities here often felt limited not because people lacked ideas, but because they lacked accessto capital, to guidance, to markets. What seems to have changed over the past several years is not just the introduction of schemes, but a change in approach. There has been a gradual move towards treating people not as passive recipients of development, but as active participants in building it.
That shift becomes clearer when you look at how entrepreneurship is being supported. Programs like PRIME Meghalaya and CM ELEVATE did not begin with the assumption that people already knew how to run businesses. Instead, they created space to learn, allowing the first-time entrepreneurs to test ideas, make mistakes, and build confidence. For many young people, especially from non-business backgrounds, that kind of support made starting up feel possible rather than intimidating.
This foundation has been scaled by bringing together financial assistance, credit linkages, and capacity-building for a much larger group of entrepreneurs. What stands out is not just the scale, but the intentto make entrepreneurship a realistic pathway, not an exception.
At the same time, this approach has not been limited to urban or service sectors. In rural areas, mission-mode interventions indairy, piggery, turmeric, and ginger have helped communities strengthen existing practices by connecting them more effectively to markets.
Furthermore, the monthly Farmers’ Market initiative has taken this a step further by reducing the gap between producers and consumers, ensuring that farmers see better returns for what they grow.
Tourism perhaps shows this transition most visibly. The Chief Minister’s Meghalaya Homestay Mission and the PRIME Tourism Vehicle Scheme initiatives have allowed local families and drivers to directly benefit from a sector that was once uneven in its reach. What used to be informal, or seasonal has begun to evolve into a more stable source of income round the year, spread across communities rather than concentrated in a few locations.
There is also a quieter layer to this transformation. Support for sports and music is opening pathways for young people whose ambitions lie beyond traditional careers. Efforts like Chief Minister’s Meghalaya Grassroot Music Project (CM-MGMP) contribute to the same broader ecosystem, one that recognises potential in different forms.
What feels most different today, however, is the mindset. There is a growing willingness among young people to try, to start something small, to take risks, to build locally. A café, a homestay, a transport service, even a farm-based enterprise, a tech-enabled platform and many more, are now no longer distant possibilities.
Challenges remain, as they always do. But across the state, these initiatives are no longer just policies on paper. They are becoming part of everyday lifeshaping decisions, creating options, and gradually redefining what growth looks like. And perhaps that is where the real change lies, from waiting for opportunities to creating them.
(The writer is the owner of Sanctuary Resort)
