Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik seems to have lately been inspired by a song titled "Words" from the Irish boy band Boyzone. The chorus lyrics of the song are, "It's only words, and words are all I have, to take your heart away." Naveen has been all-words and no-action Chief Minister. A rare politician who has managed to win three terms on empty words, which he hopes to do wonders in next elections too.
And his latest addition to empty words is the Odisha State Youth Policy-2013 unveiled by him amidst great fanfare to coincide with a rally organised by the youth wing of his party. The aim is to attract youths who constitute 42 per cent youth of the State's voters.
This policy was talked about in 2003 by Naveen and it took him ten long years of exasperating introspection leading him to finally prepare a hashed-up version of a youth policy to be dished out surreptitiously over a political gala, ostensibly to stem the declining stock value of his rapidly depleting clean image perception.
A glance at the policy document provides a clear understanding as to why it is toothless, myopic, stillborn, and a cut-paste job to blow a smokescreen for cheap youth-vote politics. The preamble of the document speaks of recognising the role of youth in the State's development. Alas, for the past 14 years of his rule, Naveen could never recognise this role!
The second section of the rationale of the policy intends to bring about alignment in the policies and programmes of his Government. The call of aligning the departmental programmes for the benefit of the youth is a much needed relief!
The first section of the guiding values and principles of the policy intends to recognise the dignity of the youth. The dignity of the youth is presently of paramount concern for the BJD Government as its own White Paper says how there are four rapes per day in Odisha! And the Government sits on its haunches and watches, claiming the law will take its course!
The page-4 of the document provides for girls and young women along with SC, ST and minorities among the special focus groups.
In fact, it has become fashionable for the BJD Government to speak in one breath about the development of these sections of society. The police have been utterly ineffective in checking crimes against women.
The socioeconomic exploitation of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and minorities continues unabated. Having failed to provide succour to them, adding them into a special focus group after 13 years of suffering is a sick joke!
Under the policy directions in Education and life Skills, statements such as conveyance support for girl students are ambiguous and do not lay down whether bicycles are considered as conveyance support or financial scholarships are a preferred mode.
The Government seeks to dangle the carrot without having to promise it. It further seeks to provide multilingual education policy for tribal students.
The policy speaks about capacity building but fails to identify how this built-up capacity would be implemented. The policy does not speak about stress on industrial and infrastructural development. It talks of training and entrepreneurship vocational programmes but is silent on generating adequate capacity.
The policy instead should have compulsorily focused on how to help the youth by seeking to develop through the Department of Industries to establish more industrial estates, information technology parks, Special Economic Zones, Public-Private Partnership programmes, Biotechnology Parks, Knowledge Centres and Industrial Clusters and Hubs to facilitate implementation of the built-in training into appropriate hands-on work.
The policy seeks to train but not to invest, seeks to increase the capacity but does not provide adequate infrastructure to bring about the much-needed hands-on implementation. It is a shrewd move by the Government to promise a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow while it knows for sure that the rainbow does not exist but is just the dispersion of its political jugglery of words through the policy.
Under the section on health and wellbeing, the policy considerations are quite amusing. On one hand, it seeks to figuratively extend the National Rural Health Mission, a United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government flagship programme, and seeks credit for that. On the other hand, it ambiguously seeks to use words like outreach and special attention for adolescent girls and young girls without specifying what the deliverables of
these words.
The policy continues to use high-sounding but non-specific words like promoting, developing, special efforts, proactively involved, initiatives without taking the pain of specifying a single verb or adjective. Under the Naveen-raj, the words are all he has to take your heart away!
Under the Sports and Physical Education section, a Sports Authority of Odisha is proposed. It speaks of making sports and physical education a part of the school curriculum. Probably till now Physical Education Teachers existed in schools for fun!
This section further speaks of a scheme for building mini-stadiums in all 314 blocks. That too when more than 100 blocks are yet to have a single +2 science college! Who knows, probably the stadiums might reach faster than the colleges!
The Panchayat Yuva Krida Aur Khel Abhiyan is an UPA Government flagship programme which this policy seeks to appropriate and repackage by adding a couple of brownies to showcase it as a BJD Government lollipop.
The active citizenship and community engagement section seeks to provide a State Institute of leadership Development to train 100,000 boys and girls covering all the 18,000 Tribal Sub-Plan villages. They would be known as "Barefoot Development Managers". The policy in fact will breed 100,000 unemployed trained managers who would be seeking jobs.
When they would not get employment, they would march down the lower PMG in Bhubaneswar and be showered with teargas shells and police batons!
While building capacity for these youths, the policy should have also been specific on their deployment. Dangling a statement that they would be trained for self-employment is a facing saving tactic, at best.
Biju Yuva Shashaktikaran Yojana for doling out Government funds to 4,000 clubs is nothing but pre-election expenses distributed by the BJD from the State coffers. Calling this a policy of empowerment is the nadir of ill-conceived governance. Formation of Directorate of Youth Affairs is just another "white elephant" taking shape. If the Government was serious about governance, it would have formed separate Directorates for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Minorities and Other Backward Classes.
These four directorates would have been more relevant than this new cosmetic addition sans role or relevance. Under the section on environment, sustainable use and conservation, literary euphemisms are again used to fill in the contents for a section about which the Government had no clue.
Statements like potential of ecotourism expansion, encouraging youth to invest (as if Odia youths are sitting on piles of cash) and training youth at different levels are peppered across the text in a bid to make sense of something but finally fails to even make sense amid the hocus-pocus of word-jugglery.
The heritage, culture and diversity section seeks to provide for a District Kola Abom Sanskruti Sangha and Block Kala Abom Sanskruti Sangha ostensibly to drive cultural activities.
The policy remains silent on the ownership of these Sanghas. Would they finally go into the clutches of local politicians, especially of the BJDIJ
The gender justice and equality section is also replete with high-sounding and non-objective statements. Gender sensitisation, addressing nutritional needs and safety and security for women dominate this section.
Instead of this, Naveen could have even pasted today's newspaper, right from the editorials to the headlines and these aspects would have been covered anyways. What was the need for a policy thenIJ
The section on globalisation and technology is partly credited to the Akhilesh Yadav experiment in UP. This seeks to provide laptops with prepaid data cards to meritorious Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes students.
Naveen's policy is more intelligent than Akhilesh's. While Akhilesh talked about numbers, Naveen keeps it silent on how many to be given the laptops. Naveen's promise seems to suggest that thousands would benefit from this, but if he cleverly utilises the meritorious criteria, he might see at best a dozen students per block getting a laptop. Naveen also needs to gift the students unlimited power backup as under his rule Odisha has turned from power-surplus to power-deficit.
The section on key strategies for implementation is hilarious. Twenty Government departments, a high-powered committee, mobilisation of stakeholders, etcetera, makes this entire policy a top-heavy structure which deals with a large number of issues but fails to strike a chord with even one of them. It is eyewash perpetuated on the youth in a bid to strike electoral gold.
Evaluation of the youth policy is to be undertaken once every three years and the findings to be tabled before the State Coordination Committee.
Instead of three years, the evaluation should have been done each year. The policy is already a dead horse being flogged by Naveen for political capital.
(Dr Sasmit Patra is a keen observer of Odisha politics. He can be reached at sasmitpatra@gmail.com)