WHAT WIll THE TOMBSTONE ON POSCO’S GRAVE READIJ
The brave new world of Odisha’s industrialisation has come crashing down with the Posco “tentatively postponing” – an euphemism for abandoning - its Rs 52,000-crore steel project in the State. For the South Korean steelmaker, it was a brutal Darwinian struggle all along. A number of factors blighted the project right from the beginning. Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik tops the list for his incompetent handling at every step of the way. land acquisition didn’t start for full five years since signing of the MoU in June 2005. Hysterical opposition by the local people under the leadership of a ragtag band of anti-Posco fanatics with a track record of serving only themselves made Patnaik dither endlessly. Then came the devious role played by the Union Environment and Forest Minister Jairam Ramesh and his more evil successor Jayanthi Natarajan. They did their best to throw all kinds of spanners. Their creation, Saxena and Meena Gupta Committee, kept the project hanging fire for far too long. Some out-of-work environmental extremists chipped in to compound the problem. High Court and Supreme Court cases against allotment of the Khandadhar mines dealt severe body blows to the Posco. And finally, the MMDR Act, which stipulated that all allotment of mines would be done only through auction and not recommendation, delivered the coup de grace. The Posco too was in no way less responsible for the sorry state of affairs. It never pursued its project with the bloody-mindedness it deserved. On the whole, the Posco is a textbook case of how not to start a project. Murphy’s law was in full spectrum operation. Anything that could go wrong had gone wrong. For all the claptrap about promoting Odisha’s industrialisation, Patnaik never gave the Posco the push it so desperately needed. He must bear the lion’s share of the blame. His crippling cautiousness scuppered the project. Investors will give their eyeteeth to set up industries in the State because of its richest hoard of mineral wealth. But Patnaik’s deathly pale visage repels them. With the look of pained constipation on his face, he is personally the investment turn-off. The frustration of the existing investors over his enduring incompetence infects all others. The State is doomed to economic stasis under his reign. Political and vested opposition to the Posco might have been the fuel, but Patnaik’s indifference provided the spark. Throughout the company’s ten-year dreary struggle, Patnaik maintained his Zen-like serenity. The tombstone over the Posco’s grave will read “Killed by Naveen Patnaik’s apathy”.
CONGRESS PARTY’S METAMORPHOSIS: FROM A BUTTERFlY TO A CATERPIllARIJ
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sirIJ” This quote from the celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes is so famous that PCC president Prasad Harichandan, a postgraduate in political science with keen interest in cerebral pursuits, must have known its significance at some point in his seasoned political life. But we see little osmosis of that knowledge into his comments on the removal of Utkalmani Gopabandhu’s statue. The statue, near the Singhdwar, was established in 1934 when Puri was little more than a glorified village with a population of mere 37,000. Its resident population now is more than two lakh. On the day of Ratha Yatra several lakhs of people visit the town and on the occasion of Nabakalebar Rath Yatra, it chokes with a vast sea of humanity. The Singhdwar is the place where people mill around the chariots for a view of the lords. The location of Gopabandhu’s statue is obviously a serious obstacle to movement of people during the festival. Harichandan, a native of the area, knows it better than anyone else that in view of the changed situation, the statue badly needed to be shifted elsewhere to prevent people from being stampeded to death. Yet, he milked the headlines by opposing the shifting. There are few pleasures so pure as finding fault in others. After a few hobgoblins waved placards against the shifting, Harichandan quickly waded in to vehemently attack the Government. If all the civic authorities in their collective wisdom decided to rectify an appalling situation by shifting the statue to a different place, why should Harichandan froth at the mouthIJ He even sent a fact-finding committee to sex up his case. The other day, he ranted full-throated that an x number of bore wells and y number of drainages were dysfunctional in Puri when he knew full well that work on them was going on in full swing. What makes his pressers irritating is his constant simpering in a silly and annoying manner even when he is angrily criticising the Government. His drive-by-shooting approach to whatever Naveen Patnaik’s Government is doing has no other purpose than to fill news pages and air time. He has converted his party into an organisation of perpetual protest. He refuses to see the evident proof of his party’s purposeless existence. When we thought, after successive failures of Niranjan Patnaik and Jayadev Jena, things can’t go any worse for the Congress, Harichandan has proved us wrong. He says he is pursuing his goal of bringing about a metamorphosis of his party. But observers wonder whether it is from a butterfly to a caterpillar.
EVEN HAMlET WOUlD FIND MAYOR JENA’S DITHERING EXCESSIVE
If anyone needed convincing evidence that the city’s uglification is down to none other than Mayor Anant Narayan Jena, the dreadful chaos in the Unit II Market Building should provide him the clincher. Under Jena’s direct personal watch, the Market Building has become a festering sore, open and weeping. It is a testimony to his epic incompetence. It all started with Jena saying, in a well-coiffed comment on the need for peaceful coexistence, that the temporary hawkers could ply their business alongside the permanent hawkers as long as they didn’t obstruct the shoppers’ passage. When his utopian idea was put into practice, it drew howls of outrage from the public. Realising his folly, he personally led an operation to throw out the hawkers occupying every inch of space in front of the Market Building. But after only four months, the hawkers are back again in the Market Building. Jena is also back again to his default mode of dithering. To cover up his vacillation, he says he is examining all angles, including legal, for ousting the raiders. Basically, the confusion in the Market Building reflects the confusion in Jena’s own mind. It is an offshoot of the constant struggle between the populist and the administrator in him. The populist in him implemented the idea of peaceful coexistence. When that failed, he promised proper rehabilitation of the oustees. But that didn’t happen. With the hawkers invading the Market Building, the administrator in him got a rude awakening. In fact, the Mayor-made crisis demonstrates clearly how he is deftly playing the role of an arsonist and a firefighter at the same time. His other projects to uglify the city are the monstrous foot over-bridges at some important points and the grossly under-supervised privatisation of garbage collection. If ever there was a grain of truth that Bhubaneswar was once a beautiful city, there is none whatsoever now. Jena has presided over its uglification like no one else. On the issue of ridding the Market Building of the hawker pest, he has to stop kicking the can down the road, once and for all. The city can’t suffer a fickle-minded Mayor any longer. A hugely disproportionate amount of his mayoral time has been spent to bring orderliness in the Market Building but to no avail. The case for keeping it free from the menace of temporary hawkers is unanswerable. Jena must forthwith drain the hawkers’ swamp. But when will he stop pirouetting and start actingIJ
(saratpattanayak@hotmail.com (M) 9437962121)