Meghalaya’s Quiet Cultural Revolution: Bringing Dignity To Music As Labour

Marbianglang Kharsyntiew, a 24-year-old singer-songwriter from Nongstoin, hardly had any avenues to showcase his talents until a few years ago. “We were always performing for free church events and local fairs, but nothing steady.” But that changed with the Chief Minister’s Grassroots Music Programme in Meghalaya. “Now, I can plan shows, record my own music, and even teach part-time. It’s not just about performing anymore; it feels like work that counts,” says Kharsyntiew.

On World Music Day 2025, while most Indian states issued celebratory hashtags or hosted symbolic concerts, Meghalaya did something altogether different: it scaled up its homegrown music programme into a ₹69 crore cultural economy blueprint. What began as a ₹3.5 crore experiment two years ago has evolved into the Chief Minister’s Grassroots Music Programme (CMGMP), now supporting over 5,400 local artists and facilitating more than 38,000 performances across towns and villages.

For Chief Minister Conrad Sangma, who once played bass and organised college concerts in Shillong, this policy is a way of building the kind of ecosystem he once went without—an ecosystem where music is treated not as a pastime but as a profession. “I know what it feels like to be rejected as a young artist,” Sangma said at the launch of the third season of CMGMP. “This programme is about telling our youth: your music matters, and the state is listening.”

Music as Infrastructure, Not Ornament

For most Indian states, the arts live on the periphery of policy—invoked in tourism brochures or cultural festivals, but rarely treated as infrastructure. Meghalaya’s approach disrupts that habit. The Chief Minister’s Grassroots Music Programme doesn’t frame music just as a heritage to be showcased, but also as a profession to be sustained. In addition to stages, it provides systems, such as small-town performance spaces, consistent honoraria, digital production and music theory training, and a district-level live event calendar.

In its third year, the programme now supports musicians across twelve districts, connecting them to sound engineers, lighting crews, and audiences that were previously out of reach. The performances are not one-off gigs, but part of a circuit designed to make music a reliable source of income. In places where public employment is shrinking, and youth migration is growing, the programme has become a modest but functional safety net for artists who’ve never had one.

Artists no longer have to wait for festivals or weddings to earn. The model quietly shifts music from passion to the economy of practice, and it’s not just urban or elite musicians who benefit. The programme has reached gospel choirs in West Khasi Hills, with solo acoustic singers from Garo villages and young producers recording original tracks in rented rooms. This program seeks more than cultural tokenism, focusing on the slow, methodical scaffolding of labour, opportunity, and recognition.

The Economics of Performance

Meghalaya’s concert economy is not built on spectacle. It runs on public planning, spreadsheets, and a quiet recalibration of value. According to the state’s own report, the CMGMP generated over ₹133 crore in direct and indirect economic activity by mid-2024, against an investment of ₹23 crore. That return didn’t come from headlining stars or viral videos. It came from singers performing in church halls, school auditoriums, and temporary stages erected in market squares.

This stands in stark contrast to one-off celebrity spectacles like the Ed Sheeran concert Shillong hosted in February 2025. “It brought buzz, but nothing changed for us. No one got booked because of it, no venues got built,” said a local artist who requested anonymity. CMGMP, by contrast, is built on sustained engagements. The programme created nearly 5,500 daily jobs, from sound technicians and lighting crews to venue workers and local transport providers, without needing to import glamour from outside.

 The artists, too, are not branded products but working professionals. Many perform weekly across block-level venues, supported by an administrative structure that ensures they are paid, promoted, and heard. Beyond the talent binary, the government has tapped into an economic rhythm, which includes recurring engagements, steady payments, and predictable cycles. Here, music is disseminated via policy rather than being merely curated.

This shift matters. In a region where formal employment remains scarce and informal work unstable, music when treated as labour, offers a different kind of dignity—not the kind that comes from applause but from being able to pay rent, support a family, or teach younger students. It is an economic activity rooted not in extraction but in expression. The ambition is not just to fund culture but to house it in real terms—in budgets, job ledgers, and the language of planning.

A Personal and Political Project

Most policies arrive from behind desks. This one began on a college stage in Delhi. Before he was Chief Minister, Conrad K. Sangma was a bassist, organising gigs as a student and navigating the routine humiliation that attends the arts when it’s not backed by pedigree. His band was once denied a performance slot because it played originals instead of covers. That memory stayed with him, not because it was dramatic, but because it was ordinary. That refusal forms the emotional root of the CMGMP. In speeches and interviews, Sangma often returns to it. “Every artist deserves a platform,” he said at the launch of Season 3 in Shillong, “but they also deserve systems. We want to create both.”

Unlike many cultural initiatives, this one does not outsource meaning. It doesn’t wait for Bollywood, Delhi, or even Guwahati validation. It draws from the rhythms of local lives. It also places the act of performance in direct relation to the act of governance. Of course, the personal is never enough. Sentiment alone does not produce infrastructure. But in this case, it seems to have set in motion a system that outgrows the sentiment. Budgets are being structured. District plans are being drawn. Technical training is being rolled out. There is an attempt—not always clean, not always even to make culture work as policy—but definitely not reduced to a mere gesture. And that’s what makes it unusual: not that a musician became a policymaker, but that he returned to music, not with nostalgia but with blueprints.

Ground Realities and Artist Voices

The numbers speak well, but the story lives elsewhere in the lives of artists who once hovered on the edge of survival. In Ri Bhoi, a 19-year-old guitarist plays at a block-level venue every weekend. Before this, he performed at school functions and church retreats, usually unpaid. Today, he receives a modest honorarium, but more importantly, he calls himself a musician without apology.

In West Garo Hills, a women’s choral group from a small village travelled to perform in four towns last season. They sang in their mother tongue, wore what they always wore, and left with enough to cover transport, meals, and something extra. When asked what had changed, one of the older singers said, “People listened differently. Not like it was a favour, but like it mattered.” Stories like these don’t announce themselves. They build slowly across rehearsals, late-night bus rides, and performance halls where the sound system stutters, but the audience stays.

The structure isn’t perfect. There are delays in payments. Some districts are more active than others. The feedback loop from musicians to planners is still shallow. But for most artists involved, it’s the first time the state has made room for them without asking them to translate, market, or dilute what they do. The significance is not just that they’re paid. It’s that the act of creation is recognised as labour. And with that comes not only income, but a shift in posture from performance as a plea to performance as presence.

Challenges and the Road Ahead

Every good policy outgrows its announcement. CMGMP now enters that difficult stretch, where success is measured not by applause but by continuity. At present, the programme runs on a clear political vision and strong executive coordination. Both have served it well. But no vision is permanent. For this ecosystem to endure, it must survive the shifts of leadership, budget cycles, and bureaucratic fatigue. What’s in place today—venues, circuits, and training modules—needs to evolve into institutions with memory and momentum.

Access, too, is uneven. Not all artists who apply are selected. Some districts remain more active than others. And despite the range of genres supported, inclusion across genders and tribes still tilts in favour of dominant voices. Many women musicians work in collectives that are informal, under-documented, and easy to miss in data sheets. Ensuring future iterations of CMGMP actively map and support these ensembles through tailored outreach or women-led district platforms could strengthen both equity and artistic diversity.

There is also the risk of symbolic capture. Cultural policy, when praised too early, can become too careful and aimed more at preserving image than expanding substance. The real work now lies in the finer details: reducing payment delays, strengthening local artist networks, and letting artist feedback shape programme design, not just its PR.

What CMGMP has started is rare: a cultural programme that thinks in terms of wages, circuits, and systems. To protect that, it must now do something harder than being innovative—it must become ordinary and part of the regular vocabulary of state support, not something exceptional.

A Northeast Blueprint?

What Meghalaya is building is neither a spectacle nor a model yet. But it offers something other states in the Northeast have struggled to name: a structure for artistic labour. It doesn’t rely on the exoticisation of culture nor package tradition for export. It turns to what already exists—community soundscapes, intergenerational choirs, schoolyard bands—and asks what it would take to make them viable. The answer, so far, lies in modest interventions with long-term effects—regular platforms; public investment; the right to perform without permission from tourism calendars or national festivals.

Other states in the region, with equally rich artistic lineages, might find a direction in CMGMP. Nagaland and Mizoram have rock archives and gospel heritage, a music industry of their own, and Arunachal has its folk experimentation. But none have institutionalised these energies into stable livelihood circuits. They remain expressions of pride, not vehicles of employment.

The lesson here is not that every state must adopt the same programme. It is that culture policy can be local, slow, and still scalable. That the arts need not wait for global recognition before being recognised by the state. That infrastructure does not always mean concrete; sometimes, it means a microphone that works, a stipend that arrives, and an audience that shows up more than once.

Meghalaya's actions are revolutionary in their commitment rather than their form. It has taken something often treated as atmospheric and given it the dignity of policy. The applause will fade, and the festivals will move on, but if the system holds, if the sound checks continue, if the payments arrive, if the singers stay, it will mark a shift not just in how we support the arts but in how we imagine the state’s role in nurturing its people’s voice—not to curate or own them but to make space. That is the work. And for once, it has begun.