BJD’s irrepressible blabbermouth
Nobody can rein in the BJD’s irrepressible blabbermouth Damodar Rout. Dropping him from the party’s long list of spokespersons has not dampened the spirit of this loose cannon. He feels verbally incontinent when he sees his bête noire, Pyarimohan Mohapatra, on the ropes. He knows he is scoring a self-goal by hinting at his Government’s patronage of the under-fire chit fund company Seashore, but if that will hurt Mohapatra in the process he won’t be the one to let the opportunity slip through his fingers. Such indiscretions have landed him in trouble in the past, but that has not stopped him from rising as a phoenix from the ashes. He regards himself as a conviction politician not afraid of incurring unpopularity.
Pyari is no babe in the woods
Pyari too is no babe in the woods. He lost no time in hitting back in kind. To have a more telling effect, he impersonated an impassioned defender of the sanctity of ‘oath of secrecy’ and ‘collective responsibility’. He quickly upped the ante by demanding Rout’s resignation from the ministry. The residual Machiavellism in him even heard in Rout’s rants sounds of anti-government uprising. But a few punches he threw didn’t seem to land on his arch opponent. Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik will see nothing wrong as long as Pyari’s enemies bloody him to his political death. Besides, Rout is an artful old fox. Deflecting attacks on him is his natural habitat.
Goebbels-style lies
Success of ‘Udyan Fresh’ spurred the Government to open ‘Chilika Fresh’. So went the soaring rhetoric on its opening day last week. Was mendacity ever more grotesqueIJ A rank failure was spun as a success. Anyone who has gone to Udyan Fresh would be appalled at the Goebbels-style lie of the Government that Udyan Fresh is a success story. The stink and stench inside these much-touted cheap and fresh vegetable stores take one’s breath away. Shrivelled vegetables make a mockery of the television advertisements showing a young petite waxing eloquent about Udyan Fresh’s lush green vegetables. Declining footfall in these stores says it all. Yet, the file-based review of the scheme’s success persuaded the heavy breathers in the Agriculture Department to embark upon another adventure. “Price stabilisation” and ‘market intervention’ are the Soviet-era jargons used by the bureaucrats to window-dress the case for their opening. By all accounts, the vegetable stores are a financial black hole, going the way all Government corporations in the State have gone before. Udyan Fresh and Chilika Fresh are basically the products of addled minds. Scrap them forthwith before the State’s finances haemorrhage.
‘Good day’ with asterisk
No one can find fault with the lowest common denominator programmes like Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. But people expected Prime Minister Narendra Modi to lead with real policies, not gestures and initiatives. So far, his tenure has seen more shadow than substance, stunts instead of real action. King of populist programmes, Modi’s governing credo seems to be to think in headlines while a cocktail of problems – slow growth, rising inflation, investment uncertainty – is darkening the economic horizon. Precious little is being done to address them. To compound it all, Arun Jaitley, the prime mover of all economic measures, is in the hospital for more than a month now. No one is even looking after his job, much less appointing someone in his place. Modi could have taken over Jaitley’s portfolios to inject the ‘animal spirit’ into our moribund economy. But he seems to have other ideas. The result: Modi’s ‘better days’ have come with an asterisk.
Mobile Road Constructor (MRC)
Considering its post-Independence origin, Bhubaneswar should have been a showcase city. But self-evidently, it is not. Its contemporary city Chandigarh is miles ahead of it in sheer liveability. Among the many factors that make a city’s living conditions rank high, city roads are definitely on top of them. But look at the streets of Bhubaneswar. Even the pock-marked moonscape will be ashamed of our road conditions. The potholes in the city are like festering sores. One friend suggested why we can’t have a Mobile Road Constructor (MRC) on the same line as mobile PCR to take care of the potholes. MRC’s job will be to regularly patrol the city streets to identify potholes and assorted road deficiencies. It will carry construction equipments, cement concrete mixtures and labourers for on-the-spot filling of potholes and setting right other minor road defects. People can call the MRC and help them identify locations that need repairs much like they call the PCR if they see any crime on the streets. Will the city fathers give it a tryIJ
(saratpattanayak@hotmail.com (M) 9437962121)