A farewell to Prof. Tomo Riba – educator, builder, and the quiet father of higher education in Arunachal Pradesh
[ Prem Taba ]
The chair is empty now.
Not physically – someone will sit in it soon enough. A new Vice-Chancellor will come with fresh energy, a new vision, a new chapter. That is how institutions work, and how they should work. No one occupies a seat permanently.
But I walk these corridors every morning. I teach in a department that did not exist before he willed it into existence. And I know – the way you know something not from data but from the air itself – that something has shifted. You feel it in the way people pause mid-conversation when his name comes up. In the small silences in the staff room. The peons who carried files to his office. The faculty members who walked in with hesitation and walked out with clarity. They all feel it. Because Prof. Tomo Riba was not just a Vice-Chancellor you reported to. He was a person you trusted. And the loss of that kind of presence is not administrative. It is human.
Some people retire and leave. Others retire and become the place itself – written into its walls, its culture, its memory, its very reason for standing. Prof. Tomo Riba belongs to that second kind. You cannot walk this campus without walking through something he built.
The boy who kept walking
He was born on 16 February 1961 in Disi Village, Lepa Rada district. His father was a shifting cultivator. There were no shortcuts, no connections, no inherited advantages. There was only the decision, made early and kept firmly, to keep walking forward.
Primary School Disi in 1971. Secondary School Basar in 1978. Higher Secondary School Aalo in 1980. J.N. College, Pasighat – B.A. Honours in Geography in 1982. North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, for his M.A. in Geography in 1985. B.Ed. from North Lakhimpur, Assam in 1989. And then, after years of teaching and administrative responsibility, he sat back down as a student and earned his Ph.D. from Rajiv Gandhi University in 1997 – the same institution he would later run, the same corridors he would walk as Registrar, the same classrooms where his own scholars would one day earn their doctorates under his guidance.
A teacher before everything else
He began teaching in 1985 – Junior Teacher at Secondary School Balijan, Senior Teacher at Higher Secondary Seijosa in 1990, College Lecturer at Government College Bomdila in 1991. Each posting a commitment, not a career move. He joined Rajiv Gandhi University in 1992 as an Assistant Professor of Geography, became Associate Professor in 2003, and full Professor in 2009 – serving the university for more than three decades. He guided 14 Ph.D. scholars to completion, published over 35 papers in national and international journals, and wrote three books. He specialised in Environmental Geography and Traditional Ecological Knowledge – subjects at the exact intersection of science and soul, of the modern world and the ancestral one.
Fourteen academic lineages. Fourteen futures that began in his patience and his refusal to abandon anyone who was genuinely trying.
The man I argued with – and learned from
I did not first meet Prof. Tomo Riba as a colleague or an admirer. I met him as a student leader sitting across a table from him in disagreement.
When I served as general secretary of the Rajiv Gandhi University Students’ Union – the RGUSU – he was the Registrar. We had real standoffs. Boundary wall demarcation, examination fee hikes, campus infrastructure, student welfare issues – I brought all of it to his office, more than once, with the full force of a young man absolutely certain he was right. He never deflected. He never dismissed. He argued back firmly, held his ground where he had to, and acknowledged the students’ case where it was legitimate. He was not soft. But he was fair. And there is an enormous difference between those two things.
What I did not expect, in the middle of all those standoffs, was what he said privately. He would call me aside and say: take research seriously. Write papers. Attend conferences. Build your academic identity. I half-listened then. But I followed it – slowly, over the years that followed. Whatever academic identity I am still building today traces back, in part, to a Registrar who found a moment between disputes to tell a young student leader that his mind was worth developing.
More father than administrator
What set him apart from most administrators was not his designations. It was his humanity. He never made you feel small. He never used his authority as a wall. When you came to him with a problem – whether you were a student with a complaint, a faculty member with a grievance, or a junior staff member with a worry – he listened. Really listened. Not the performance of listening, but the kind that happens when someone believes what you are saying might actually matter.
He spoke not from a distant administrative height but from lived experience – having been a teacher at every level, from a village secondary school to a central university. His advice was personal, specific, the kind that quietly changes the trajectory of a life. Many who passed through his door came for official business and left with something they had not expected: the sense that someone senior genuinely cared whether they succeeded or not. That is not administration. That is fatherhood of a particular and rare kind.
Building what did not exist
At Rajiv Gandhi University, he served as Head of the Department of Geography, Dean of the Faculty of Environmental Sciences, First Dean of Students’ Welfare, Director of Distance Education, First Chief Vigilance Officer, First Coordinator of the Outreach Programme, Coordinator of the Women Technology Park, Controller of Examinations, Finance Officer, and Registrar. Notice how many carry the word “First.” These are not titles inherited from predecessors. There were no predecessors. He was creating roles – building the rooms they would sit in, making things work from nothing.
In 2004, he built something that changed Arunachal’s media landscape permanently. The state’s first formal course in Mass Communication – the Post Graduate Diploma at Arunachal University, forerunner of the Department of Mass Communication at RGU – was established with him as its administrative coordinator. He was then a Senior Lecturer in Geography. A geographer, running the state’s first media programme, because some people do not wait for a job description to do what needs to be done. Today, over 80% of Arunachal’s working media professionals are alumni of that department – at the BBC, Doordarshan, All India Radio, and running their own production houses. Every journalist in this state who tells Arunachal’s stories to the world is, in some indirect but very real way, an outcome of what he built in 2004. And when he became the founding Vice-Chancellor of APU, he did it again – he established the Department of Mass Communication at this campus too, ensuring that students of eastern Arunachal would no longer have to travel far to pursue a career in media. Two institutions. Two departments. Two decades apart. The same conviction, both times, that this state’s stories deserve trained, qualified people to tell them.
The world called. He always came back.
The world took note of him too. In 2002-2003, he worked as a Consultant with the International Labour Organisation on combating drug addiction in the Northeast – bringing international institutional weight to bear on a devastating local crisis. In 2010, he spent three months at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, Japan. In 2012, he returned as a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University for six months. One of the world’s great academic institutions invited him. He went. He contributed.
And then he came home. Always home. Back to Rono Hills. Back to Pasighat. Back to Arunachal. He does not confuse recognition with purpose. Recognition is what happens to you. Purpose is what you choose. He always chose Arunachal.
Building APU – A university from bare ground
The Arunachal University Act was passed in 2012, but the institution remained dormant for years. It became operational in 2022 with the appointment of its first Vice-Chancellor: Prof. Tomo Riba. He did not walk into a functioning university. He walked into an aspiration. No culture. No institutional memory. Buildings under construction while students were already enrolled. Forty-eight regular teaching positions unfilled.
He began. He built. He composed the university anthem – because a university without a song has no soul. He designed the university logo. He created departments, brought in faculty, affiliated colleges, and grew the institution to 11 departments, five offering PhD programmes. He established the Department of Mass Communication at APU too – the second such department he built, across two institutions and two decades. I joined that department in October 2025. When I write on that board, when I sit across from students learning to tell this state’s stories, I am standing inside something he built for people like me. I think about that more than I expected to.
He had the university adopt Anganwadi centres and had the Outreach Cell visit tuberculosis patients in their homes – because a university that exists only for its enrolled students has misunderstood its purpose. At the first convocation in October 2025, over 66% of the successful graduates were women. That does not happen by accident. It happens when the culture of the institution – set from the top, lived from the top – genuinely believes in it.
A son who never left his people
Before the degrees and the titles, he was, and remains, a son of the Galo people. In 2000, he chaired the Drafting Committee of the First General Conference of the Galo Welfare Society and became the first person to formally initiate the process of Galo language development. He designed the logos of the Galo Welfare Society, Menjik Mengkok Rwwgu Basar, and KAWA. He chaired the Text Book Development Committee of GURUKUL – the indigenous school that teaches the modern curriculum alongside traditional games, crafts, and the Galo language. Galo children will grow up and many will never know his name. But they will speak their language. They will carry forward a world that almost disappeared – and did not, in part because he refused to let it.
The complete human- bees, guitar, mushrooms and all
One last thing must be said, because it is essential to understanding who he is in full. He designed eight logos including the emblems of RGU and APU. He composed university anthems for both institutions – songs that will ring in convocation halls long after those who remember him have grown old. He designed the physical structures of three buildings.
And beyond all institutional work – he plays musical instruments and sings. He paints and photographs. He builds houses with his own hands. He keeps bees. He cultivates mushrooms. He does vermi-composting and tends a garden. In a world of narrow specialists, here is a whole man – one who sees no contradiction between composing a university anthem and keeping bees, who understands that a person who cannot build something with their hands cannot fully understand what it means to build an institution.
Some people don’t leave – they become the place
Kalidasa wrote of rivers and their long journeys – how all rivers, however many mountains they have carved through, eventually fulfil their purpose by merging into the sea. Prof. Tomo Riba’s life has been such a river. From Disi village through the teaching years, through three decades at RGU, through Kyoto and the ILO offices and the Galo language committees – always moving with purpose and integrity, always knowing which direction he was heading.
And now the river has reached the sea.
But here is what I have come to understand, walking this campus every morning: certain people do not simply depart. They become the building. They become the corridor you walk through, the anthem you sing at convocation, the department you teach in, the language children speak. They become the place so completely that separating them from it is no longer possible.
Prof. Tomo Riba has retired. But he has not left. He is in every classroom of this campus. In every student who walks out of these gates with a degree and a sense of purpose. In the bees he kept and the songs he composed and the words Galo children now read in their own language. In the fourteen scholars who carry his academic lineage forward. In every person who ever walked into his office uncertain – and walked out believing in themselves a little more than before.
That is not a legacy. That is a presence. And presences do not retire.
We at Arunachal Pradesh University make him a promise today. We will not let what he built become merely a memory. We will make it a living thing – growing, reaching, serving, exactly the way he always intended. Every classroom. Every paper written. Every student who leaves this campus and goes out to tell Arunachal’s stories to the world – that will be our tribute to him. Not just today. Not just this year. But for as long as this institution stands.
The chair is empty. The building stands. The river has reached the sea.
And the sea – as it always does – remembers every single drop.
(The writer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mass Communication, Arunachal Pradesh University, Pasighat)
