The Odisha Government drew Rs 734 crore from the Contingency Funds to bring relief to the distressed farmers. The State being essentially an agrarian community, it is desirable that the ruling masters did organise some special support to keep farmers out of helplessness. When several States have begun waving farm loans, which is a bad practice as loan waivers do not turn farmers any smarter, the Odisha administration decided to extend such help as would make them resilient as well as more skilled to manage emergencies themselves by remaining as glued to agriculture as ever. Loan waiver promotes laziness. Just doing farming for farming sake with the ultimate aim of getting a loan waiver has lately become a common phenomenon which is dangerous. Thus, Odisha decided to extend good loans on the soft mode so that farmers are never under the pressure of having to pay exorbitant interest amounts which keep mounting. The Contingency Funds are a special reserve to be spent when disasters including natural calamities, extreme financial emergency situations occur due to unexpected crop failure, the circumstances that require immediate monetary assistance to save lives.
The Constitution of India permits spending of contingency funds on any emergency requirements. The farmers in distress pose such a situation and availing funds from the pool is perfectly lawful. Congress and BJP loudmouths keep screaming 'fault and sin' because most of them don’t know law nor do they want to learn the basics even after being explained about the norms and the rules. Many NDA-fold States like Maharashtra spent Rs 8 crore on publicity events involving PM Modi. Similarly, there are many instances of State Governments availing this special fund to meet emergency situations of several kinds. The Odisha farmers' prevailing plight had literally created a grave emergency situation which ended instant addressing.
People of India and many world-class thinkers who respect India as a massively growing democracy are anxious to know how unethically a big statue ate up a whopping Rs 3,000 crore for purely ego-satisfying purposes. When Mayawati of UP insanely put up a park of giant elephant statues in Lucknow, the rest of India had condemned her as a most hated politician for the act which sucked in incalculable pubic money. Conscious citizens are now keen to know if India can ever recover the huge money spent on a statue of a statesman, whose noble deeds are certain to be forgotten or ignored due to the confounding size of the statue. To see the whole statue, one has to take a chopper ride around, which is not affordable. The entry fees too are prohibitive for ordinary people. Even if one million people buy the costliest ticket for the ‘Statue of Unity’ which costs Rs 350 for the observation deck, only Rs 35 crore would be collected in a full year without huge expenses taken into account. The Spring Temple of Buddha in China fails to attract tourists who prefer the age-old heritage sites like the Great Wall, Forbidden City and Terracotta Army. One David D' Costa posted a message on Facebook claiming that most of the funding for the Statue project was made by public sector oil companies. "When India is literally crying for reduction in oil prices...This is how our oil sector PSUs are made to splurge their money!" he slammed the planners. It appears the Modi administration is a populist one; and, hence, huge amounts of public money is being wasted. Modi’s foreign tours expenses too have not been taken well by the general public. The benefits of his foreign trips are only a little; his personal image boosting has been phenomenal without actually bringing any benefit to the country in real development terms.
Even Raghuram Rajan, former RBI Governor who abandoned post in disgust, had emphasised the need to have a decentralised structure of Government to which no one paid heed. He says even today that the Governments should learn how to implement reforms from the Narasimha Rao administration in which Dr Manmohan Singh was the Finance Minister. In a TV interview in Davos, Rajan had said that political leadership has to build consensus to implement reforms, some of which can be learned how the former Congress Prime Minister and Finance Minister worked behind the scenes to make things work effectively. Without taking any name, Rajan had also said that leadership is important for reforms and an overly-centralised Government can't achieve that. "An overly-centralised structure of government may offer leadership but may not offer the ability to implement and one of the lacunae we have seen over the last few years is that the policy plans at the top don't get translated into implementation," Rajan said. He also talked about a host of issues related to Indian economy, Lok Sabha polls and farm distress. Here are some snippets from his conversation: People want change: He said Indian voters are very smart and want change because of low job growth, low-tolerance in the country and concerns over institutional freedom. "My sense is that the pressure from people now for change is increasing and any government will have to respond to that. In this election as a citizen of India, there are three big issues- jobs, how tolerant we are towards different views of minorities and concern about how to protect our institutions. Whether it is Supreme Court, the election commission, or the RBI," "It would be appropriate for the RBI Governor to be below the finance minister but typically above the bureaucracy, because it is not appropriate that the RBI Governor be dictated to by a secretary in the government."
Thus it is crystal clear that except a very few good things like the GST and the bankruptcy Act, the Modi administration has grossly erred on the governance front -- wrong priorities like record-making statue, pleasure foreign trips, showing the way to efficient functionaries like Raghuram Rajan and more. For that matter, Odisha has not committed one grave financial blunder as is made out by opposition leaders and adversaries. Odisha BJP leaders are just a terrible lot, ranting the wrong rhetoric to lose public support and sympathy. The so-called educated ones have no sense of governance or statesmanship; the front-liners are horribly crude and loud. More interestingly, the local Congress outfit is thinning out fast with stalwarts and sure-win characters abandoning the age-old political entity. It is a pity that the Odisha Congress is struggling to even survive as a mere picture on the wall, particularly when the national president Rahul Gandhi has come of age and is making waves across the locales he is moving by having improved the fundamentals impressively -- basic knowledge, behaviour and conduct and, above all, charisma, after suffering for long at the hands of the opponents for being a pinhead and an unforgivable greenhorn. This indicates the local leader has problems and needs to amend ways by being able to convince colleagues that he is willing to work hard by sacrificing personal gains.
The situation, not surprisingly, suits the Naveen administration immensely, more than ever before. If the BJP and the Congress do not wake up adequately, it will be BJD again!