The recent looting and destruction of properties at the tourist lodge in Kaying in Siang district is a prime example of how government funds are misused in the state. Properties worth around Rs 10 lakhs have either been damaged or robbed. Shockingly, the officials of the tourism department – the custodians of the tourist lodge – were not even aware of the incident, and the locals had to alert them. No staffer was posted at the tourist lodge by the department. The total negligence on the part of the department should be properly investigated. The state government should order an inquiry into it and punish those responsible for messing up the tourist lodge. However, this is not an isolated incident. So many cases of construction of tourist lodges, community halls, multipurpose halls, etc, using government funds, and later abandoning them, are regularly reported from various corners of the state.
The assets created are not properly taken care of by the government, which leads to utter wastage of public money. For a fund-crunched state like Arunachal Pradesh, every penny matters a lot. Therefore the government should stop funding projects which are not viable. Further, the job of the government is not only to create assets but also to take care of them. This is one area where successive governments have bitterly failed. They construct roads and other infrastructures but never properly maintain them. The Hollongi-Itanagar and the Papu-Yupia-Potin roads are two examples. Just three years ago these two stretches of roads looked world-class, but today they are in a deplorable condition as the government has failed to maintain them.