Today the world is unthinkable without mobile phones. During the landline days, only one per cent Indian households could own the tele-talking instrument with great difficulty. The wealthy bribed and got phones installed in days; the middleclass waited for years. The poor looked up the talking machine in wonder and awe! Upstart Parliamentarians sold from their quota like they did for cooking gas connections. They also extracted maximum possible benefits from helpless parents seeking help in admitting kids into the Kendriya Vidyalays, only because lawmakers have some discretionary quota in hand. Most Odisha MPs cheat aspirants with meaningless recommendation notes which the Vidyalaya authorities consign to the wastepaper basket even today. Even today, MPs do not feel ashamed to rent out their rooftop servant facility too for pocket money. Patsani was once nabbed by the police for having harboured a criminal on his rooftop dwelling space. The police let him free only because of his misleading saffron robe. The first mobile phone service was launched in October 1983 by the Ameritech Mobile Communications for the general public in Chicago.
3 While some of the unworthy lawmakers of India remain brazenly engaged in pinching public money and individual pockets, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has just declared he will donate the entire Nobel Peace prize money to help the victims of the 52-year conflict in his country. Similarly, Uruguayan President Jose Mosuca lives in a ramshackle of a house in a farm growing grains for survival with wife as the principal farm worker and rides a thirty-year-old Vespa scooter to the presidential office. He doesn’t even accept a salary, while our law makers gang up during the pay hike debates irrespective of their ideological differences.
3 October is also historic further as in 2011 King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk of Bhutan married a twenty-one-year old student, Jetsun Pema, from a commoner community at a lavish Buddhist ceremony, which was telecast live within the county. But in India, the caste system is getting stronger in some of the States for wedding and vote grabbing purposes.
3 The people of India will remember October as eventful for it had given the State of Odisha an unnamed Super Cyclone in 1999 and Phailin in 2013 causing irreparable damages to the Odisha and Andhra coasts.
Way back in October of 1884,
3 Greenwich in london was established as the universal time meridian of the world. Greenwich Mean Time, thereafter, became the international reference for determining standard time across the regions of the world.
3 October 11 is the International Day of the Girl Child. Odisha used to be a female-heavy State of India for a long time until after Independence. Now the glory is gone. lately, the State Government has taken the issue very seriously and has come up with a comprehensive plan of action with a clear set of objectives:
m To arrest the declining child sex ratio through interventions that address social prejudices and unethical practices;
m promote equal opportunities and bridge the gender gap in health, education, skills, work participation, employment and asset ownership;
m support effective participation and representation in political and decision making processes;
m facilitate gender justice and equality by strengthening legal and institutional frameworks;
m ensure universal access to rights and entitlements of girls and women;
m eliminate all discrimination against girls and women.
Some tiny improvement may have happened, but the results have not shown the desired trend as yet. The authorities have to work harder with improved political will.
The Naveen administration is known for clean, transparent governance. The populist politicians have been ignored in critical issues which are routinely resolved by bureaucratic super brains.
But in this October, some anxiety-causing news has filtered out of the portals of power. Corruption watchdogs have got irrefutable information that acts of corruption have taken place mainly because horribly crooked and greedy low-minded officials are involved. The Chief Minster and his principal bureaucrats seemingly do not know anything at all. Countless anonymous letters have been pouring in causing great public distress. For instance, there is hot discussion about a woman DSR once serving in Puri, has been identified as one having committed horrific acts of corruption including execution of sale deeds by dead persons and running away to Kolkata several times on requisition without the permission of appropriate authorities. The then ADM-district registrar had inquired and found her guilty on all points. The highest revenue authorities initiated dismissal proceedings, and she was served a ‘show-cause’ notice to explain why she should not be dismissed as per rule and statute after being suspended abruptly. But somehow, the lady managed to get an interim stay from the State Administrative Tribunal and, thus, escaped being suspended and forced to show cause. The chief administrator, suspecting that the government lawyers may not do their job well due to pressure, deployed a top High Court advocate to ensure law took its natural course. When the chief administrator got shifted, the woman got active in shady deals. By then, the stay on suspension and ‘show cause’ had been vacated. Despite this adverse situation, the revenue authorities got her reinstated and posted in Dhenkanal. The proceedings against her did not continue as per law. Believably, the Odisha Public Service Commission too was critical of the case and modified the ‘dismissal’ order to ‘removal’ meaning she can reappear at recruitment tests freshly and be selected on merit to serve the State but cannot enter the same department ever again. The woman allegedly has amassed so much wealth that she comes to office loaded with gold, from toes to head. Anonymous letters from the department say she has managed the Minister’s corrupt staff to keep the truth hidden so that her reentry goes unnoticed. A senior bureaucrat said that in the history of Odisha such an act of ‘crime cover-up’ has never occurred on record. The High Court lawyer rues that the department has purposefully avoided pursuing the case to its logical conclusion. The Principal Secretary has been kept in dark. Rumour is that one personal officer with the Minister is the mastermind behind the crime. The Minister says he is only following what the trustworthy subordinates place before him as legally fit. There is talk of a retired bureaucrat having been reappointed to do such dirty jobs as he can escape without much hurt or damage in case of exposure. Incidentally, some nondescript struggling lawyer somewhere did file a false PIl against the no-nonsense top administrator to turn the water murky and opaque. The anonymous informers have promised to come out in the open soon after the truth is out in the open. The lawyer feels beaten down when no official in the Revenue Department is willing to furnish critical information even on formal demand. So strange is it that despite a clean-image, demigod-Chief Minister, mean employees dare engage in acts of corruption and ‘crime cover-up’.
At least one dozen activists are now digging into the facts. The particular names would be revealed soon, they say. If the woman DSR’s crime cover-up goes unattended and remains in dark for long, the whole humanity is bound to suffer until the almighty God descends to demolish the bad and protect the good. It is of course painful to plan demolition of someone who was once a girl child. But then, Suparnakha of Ramayana and Putana of Krishna lila too were girl children but of ‘demon’ class. Suparnakha lost her nose, and Putana died of a fatal breast-bite.
3 Dussehra is the festival for celebrating victory of the good over the evil. Hopefully, post festival times this year will witness the wicked crying for mercy and the good being fittingly rewarded. The top decision makers have to take notice so as to cleanse the public systems of evil elements, no matter if they are mighty and moneyed, male or female.
The masses will have greater sympathy for the girl child if demon-class erring female servants are punished exemplarily.
(The writer is a core member of Transparency International, Odisha)