By Balakmen Suting
I have lived in a rented house in Shillong before, and I live in one now. Over the years, this has given me a ringside view of a quiet crisis unfolding in our city: the steady arrival of people from the villages and the districts, coming for work, for livelihood, and most of all for education. Among them are young students whose parents have toiled for years, often in fields or small trades back home, to send a son or daughter to a college or university in the capital. Many of these students are not merely studying; they are also working odd hours before or after class, doing whatever they can to cover the rent, because the rent itself has become the single hardest obstacle standing between a rural family and its child’s degree.
Shillong’s rental market has grown quietly ruthless. A single unfurnished room on the outskirts can cost anywhere from three to six thousand rupees a month; a modest one-bedroom flat can run into the tens of thousands. There is no regulatory ceiling on what a landlord or agent may charge, and no real recourse when fees are raised arbitrarily or “agent charges” are added without explanation, a pattern serious enough that citizens have publicly called for the government or the Dorbar Shnong to step in and cap such practices. For a family living on a modest rural income, this is not an inconvenience. It is often the deciding factor in whether a child goes to college at all.
The colleges and universities that should be absorbing this pressure are themselves buckling. Across the city, hostel seats fall far short of the number of outstation and first-generation students who need them most, and the seats that do exist are often allotted first to those who arrive early or know the right people. Elsewhere, funds sanctioned for new hostel blocks have been known to sit unused for years amid administrative delay, money meant for beds and dignity, going nowhere, while students crowd three to a room or pay private landlords what their parents can barely afford.
To be fair, Shillong is not entirely without shelter for its students. Private hostels dot the city, and several missions and churches run hostels of their own, some of them well regarded for their discipline and care. But these fill up quickly, cater mostly to those who can pay their fees or meet their particular entry conditions, and are nowhere near enough in number to absorb the scale of arrivals every admission season. Goodwill and charity have carried this burden for years; they were never meant to carry it alone. What is missing is shelter guaranteed as policy, hostels a government builds, funds, and answers for, open to any student on the basis of need rather than a private management’s discretion or the lack of a church-run bed.
This is not a problem unique to us. Other countries, facing the same collision between rural aspiration and urban rent, have chosen to treat student housing as a public good rather than leaving it to private and charitable providers alone and their models are instructive.
In Germany, student housing is not left to individual universities or the open market. It is run by regional public bodies called ‘Studentenwerke’, which operate more than seventeen hundred halls of residence nationwide, housing close to two hundred thousand students at rents far below the private market, often between two hundred and four hundred euros a month, utilities included. Crucially, rooms are allotted according to social need rather than a student’s ability to pay, and the German national student union has continued to press federal and state governments for still greater subsidy, arguing that low-cost housing is inseparable from the right to study.
France runs a comparable system through CROUS, the state’s regional centres for student welfare, which offer subsidised residence rooms priced as low as one hundred fifty euros a month, prioritised for scholarship holders and students from modest families. Even students who live in the open rental market are entitled to apply for a state housing allowance that can shave fifty to two hundred fifty euros off their monthly rent, an entitlement extended to international as well as French students.
Closer to our own region, the Malaysian state of Sabah itself a place of small towns and rural hinterlands not unlike ours has moved to build hostels that house poor rural students entirely free of charge, funded through the state government and its education foundation, precisely because officials recognised that scholarships alone meant little if a student could not first find a roof.
What these examples share is a simple premise: that a government which invests in a rural student’s school fees but abandons them the moment they need a bed in the city is only half-educating them. Meghalaya does not lack the resources to attempt something similar; it lacks, so far, the will to make hostel construction and rent relief a stated priority rather than an afterthought. A state hostel scheme, modest at first, prioritising women, first-generation learners, and students from the districts, and open to those studying in any college or university in the city could be built through convergence of existing central and state education funds, with rent pegged to what an ordinary rural household can realistically afford, not what the private market will bear. Rent regulation for private lodgings near campuses, even a simple registration and fee-transparency requirement for landlords and agents, would cost the exchequer nothing and could be implemented immediately.
Every year, another batch of young people arrives in Shillong carrying the hopes, and the hard-earned savings, of a family back in the villages. They deserve more than a room they can barely afford and a government that looks away. It is time our state treated a student’s shelter with the same seriousness it treats their syllabus.
