Every government facing an uncomfortable debt number reaches for the same trick: put it next to a bigger number. Meghalaya’s Finance Department has done exactly that, holding its ₹26,601 crore liability stock up against Assam, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, states whose debts run into lakhs of crores, and letting the comparison do the talking. The implied logic is simple, and it’s also a dodge: Meghalaya owes less, so Meghalaya must be fine.
The first half of that sentence is arithmetic. The second half is spin. Of course a state with two million people owes less than one with two hundred million. That’s not fiscal discipline, that’s population. The comparison Meghalaya keeps offering answers a question nobody is actually asking. Nobody serious thinks Meghalaya should owe as much as Maharashtra. What people should be asking, and what this government would clearly prefer they didn’t, is what Meghalaya actually did with the ₹26,601 crore it borrowed, where it went, what got built, and whether any of it is generating enough value to justify what’s now sitting on the state’s books.
The exact question gets sharper once you look at the trajectory rather than the snapshot. Liabilities jumped from ₹21,520 crore in 2023-24 to ₹26,601 crore in 2024-25, a ₹5,081 crore increase in a single year, pushing the debt-to-GSDP ratio to 44.61 percent according to CAG’s own audit. That’s not a number you deflect with a comparison chart. That’s a number you explain.
Break down the ₹26,601 crore itself and the government’s favourite defence starts doing real work: internal debt accounts for roughly ₹16,282 crore, loans from the Centre around ₹5,565 crore, and small savings, provident funds and similar obligations another ₹2,557 crore. Within that, roughly ₹5,193 crore sits under the Centre’s SASCI scheme, 50-year, interest-free loans that genuinely don’t carry the punishing cost of ordinary market borrowing. That’s the government’s strongest card, and it’s a real one.
But cheap money spent badly is still money wasted, and here’s where the government’s press releases go suspiciously quiet. Officials will happily tell you SASCI has financed roads, water supply, power infrastructure, tourism projects and digital libraries. What they won’t tell you, because apparently nobody’s asked hard enough, is whether any of it actually works.
A tender being issued is not a road. A budget line item is not clean water reaching a household tap. A press conference photo-op is not a functioning tourism site. Somewhere between “sanctioned” and “delivered” lies the entire question of whether this borrowing was worth it, and that’s precisely the part the government’s own accounting conveniently skips.
Take Umiam. The lake’s redevelopment was pitched under SASCI as an “iconic tourism destination project,” and a government tender from April 2025 confirms the SASCI financing. Fine, that’s on the record. What’s not on the record, anywhere the public can actually see it, is whether Umiam today attracts more visitors, generates more economic activity around the lake, or remains exactly the underwhelming stretch of shoreline it was before the money arrived. The same applies to the proposed MICE infrastructure at Mawkhanu, another line item dressed up as an economic strategy, with zero operational proof behind the promise yet.
The digital library programme deserves the same skepticism. ₹162 crore, spread across “hundreds” of facilities statewide, sounds like a genuine achievement in a press briefing. It sounds considerably less impressive once you ask the questions the government hopes you won’t: how many of these libraries are actually open, how many students use them, whether the internet connection works, who’s paying to keep the lights on, and whether any of this survives past the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Those aren’t hostile questions. They’re the bare minimum any citizen is owed before being told their state’s growing debt was “investment.”
Roads deserve identical treatment. If more than ₹2,000 crore in SASCI money has genuinely gone into road connectivity, the state owes citizens a project-by-project ledger, sanctioned cost, money actually spent, physical progress on the ground, original deadline, revised deadline, and current condition, not a rounded-up headline figure meant to sound impressive in a budget speech. Without that ledger, there’s no way to distinguish a well-executed expensive project from a stalled one from an outright failure. And that opacity is not an accident. It’s a choice.
Here’s the number that should worry Meghalaya’s taxpayers more than anything wrapped in a SASCI press release: 72.5 percent of the state’s gross borrowing in 2024-25 went straight to repaying earlier debt, leaving barely 27.5 percent as genuine net borrowing for anything new. That’s not “debt servicing is normal,” that’s a state whose capacity to fund fresh development is shrinking even as its total liabilities climb, a government running faster just to stay in the same place.
Add the state’s fiscal deficit hitting 8.69 percent of GSDP against declining revenue receipts in the same year, and the picture stops looking like healthy, growth-oriented borrowing and starts looking like a state increasingly borrowing to stand still, while telling voters it’s building the future.
None of this means every rupee of Meghalaya’s debt was squandered. Some of it may be exactly the kind of infrastructure spending a capital-starved hill state genuinely needs. But that possibility is precisely why the government doesn’t get to hide behind vague talk of “capital investment” and expect applause. If the debt represents investment, show the investment. If SASCI built productive infrastructure, publish the project-by-project record, not a rounded total in a budget speech. If borrowing is supposed to strengthen Meghalaya’s economy, then prove it, with better connectivity, higher tourism receipts, stronger own-revenue collection, real employment numbers, not another comparison chart against Uttar Pradesh’s debt.
₹26,601 crore is not, on its own, a number to panic over. But being smaller than Maharashtra’s debt is not a defence either, it’s a distraction, and a fairly transparent one. The question Meghalaya’s government has spent considerable energy avoiding is the only one that actually matters: what did the state buy with this money, and where’s the receipt?
