As is well known, flying for commercial airlines is a highly paying job, but requires years of costly training, something beyond the reach of a majority. The patronage of an institution such as the Assam Flying Club by the State Government would have at least reduced the cost of training for adventurous youths of the North East who wished to take up flying as a profession. The tale of one such high-flier, Captain Papory Choudhury, the first woman commercial pilot from the North East, illustrates the difficulties faced by an individual from this area when aspiring to take up a specialised profession. Her fancy reaching out for the skies since a child, she had enrolled in the Assam Flying Club and begun initial flight training there in 1989. But such was the inadequacy of facilities of the neglected and moribund club that she had to shift to the Delhi Flying Club in 1994, and acquire her Commercial Pilot Licence from there. Captain Choudhury was doubly handicapped; not only was she from the North East, she too was a female pilot in a male-dominated profession. The outcome has been that, despite having put on sufficient flying hours and gained experience handling different aircrafts, she is even today without a job because she did not have the finances required to fund her stint as a pilot trainee with private airlines.

Hers is not an isolated instance of high-fliers from the North East being grounded because of lack of facilities or assistance from the State Government. Many States offer scholarships or grants for training in specialised professions like the one Captain Choudhury had aimed for. But, in the case of the North East, there is no such provision.

If Captain Choudhury, who could at least raise the Rs 9 lakh required for training to get her pilot’s licence, has suffered such a fate, becoming a pilot for the less affluent of this region can merely be an opium dream. No doubt, specialised professions offer very few jobs for the taking, and can hardly be construed a solution to the problems of unemployment. Yet, at the same time, it must not mean that the youths of the North East should never aspire to a career in such professions.

It is the bounden duty of the State Governments not merely to try and remove the handicaps of remoteness and lack of facilities confronted by enterprising individuals, but frame financial schemes to help them. If ambitious high-fliers from the North East are to be equipped to compete on equal terms with the rest of the nation, it is the State which through innovative assistance must provide them with wings, so that they can take off and not remain forever grounded.