Shillong, Aug 2: As Parliament debates the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Bill 2026, a West Garo Hills official in the opposition Trinamool Congress (TMC) has said that Meghalaya’s education crisis runs much deeper than exam paper leaks.
In a statement issued on Sunday, Richard Marak, the TMC’s district convener for WGH, said the basic purpose of public education is not just to conduct exams that do not get leaked.
“Education should help our young people grow from the ground up, teaching them to think clearly, building their capability and giving them economic dignity,” he said.
He added that when national policy turns education into nothing more than an anti-cheating exercise and forces one single syllabus on everyone, local histories, languages and states’ needs get pushed to the side.
“Education is not an assembly line that shapes every child into the same mould made far away in some office,” Marak said.
He questioned whether the education Meghalaya’s youth pursue for years actually prepares them for life in the state.
According to Marak, central policy is pushing students harder toward big national exams, and because those exams stick strictly to NCERT books, the state government has largely adopted the same textbooks.
“But just because Delhi is pushing does not mean we have to follow blindly,” he said. “When we do, our own history, our tribal ways of governing, languages like Khasi, Garo and Pnar, and even our hills and forests become little more than footnotes, whether a child is studying in Shillong, Tura or Delhi.”
Citing figures, Marak said around 70,000 young people leave school or college in Meghalaya every year, while the government can provide only about 2,000 to 2,500 jobs.
“That means more than 95 percent of our youth will never get a government post,” he said. “Still we keep turning out thousands of general arts and science graduates whose degrees have little to do with what the local economy needs. We need people skilled in tourism, food processing, agri-business, digital work and green jobs. Our curriculum still pays little attention to these areas.”
He further said it “makes no sense to demand constitutional recognition for Khasi and Garo on one hand and then hand over our entire school curriculum to ready-made books from Delhi on the other.”
“This approach leaves out our own scholars, writers and historians who should be deciding what our children learn,” Marak added.
The TMC leader also criticised the state’s move to bring out official guidebooks with model answers for the SSLC exams.
“Telling students to cram model answers for one exam day does not raise standards. It only locks them into rote learning,” he said.
Marak called for strengthening the Meghalaya Board of School Education (MBoSE) instead of relying on outside frameworks.
“We should take pride in our own Meghalaya Board of School Education (MBoSE). Instead of always leaning on outside frameworks, we need to strengthen MBoSE so it can create a curriculum that gives space to local writers and truly reflects our state,” he said.
He added that colleges and universities need the freedom to start practical courses linked to real opportunities in Meghalaya, “from hill ecology and climate resilience to community tourism.”
On examination reforms, Marak said handing out heavy punishments after a paper leak cannot give a student back the years they have lost.
“We need proper security before the exam even starts, and we need to stop letting one three-hour paper decide a young person’s whole future. Continuous assessment and practical testing give a much clearer picture of what someone can actually do,” he said.
He concluded by saying young people are leaving Meghalaya not only because jobs are few, “but because they feel the education system does not value who they are or what they can become.”
