Tukuni’s Vande Bharat rush turns an embarrassment
Amid the buzz over Odisha getting at least one Vande Bharat Express soon, Commerce and Transport Minister Tukuni Sahu got heavily trolled on social media immediately after she shared her letter to Union Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw demanding the train on three routes in the state.
She came under fire in a microblogging platform for seeking the semi-high-speed train service on Puri-Howrah route a day before the trial run of the Vande Bharat rake on the same route.
Twitterati reacted sharply. “It’s already planned on Howrah-Puri route. Why requesting now? To take credits? Ajab propaganda!!!!” tweeted one. Taking a dig at the minister on migration, another said, “Please sanction a Vande Bharat between Surat and Odisha so that our pride - migrant labourers can reach home fast during vacations.”
Sahu too made a goof-up in the letter to the Union minister by mentioning Puri-Raipur as another route in the subject line instead of Puri-Rourkela. The mistake was corrected later. The third route was Bhubaneswar-Hyderabad, which SM users requested to change to Baripada-Hyderabad.
~ Hemant Kumar Rout
Performance review giving sleepless nights to ministers
Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik is set evaluate the performance of all his ministers starting May 22, just a week before the completion of four years of BJD’s fifth term in government. Though an annual ritual, the proposed review is giving sleepless nights to the ministers as it comes at a time when the next election is just a year away and speculations are rife in party circles about many leaders (some say one-third) being denied tickets as the BJP did in Gujarat and the upcoming Karnataka Assembly elections.
As aspirants for BJD ticket are growing every day, none of the sitting MLAs barring a few is confident of getting the next chance.
While the opposition has termed the exercise meaningless when ministers have not been given a free hand in managing their departments, jokes are also doing rounds in the power corridor that the performance of the ministers will not be up to the mark as all of them were kept busy in managing by-elections. The bypoll to Brajarajnar happened in June 2022 and then came Dhamnagar in November.
The Padampur by-election took place after a month in December and currently, most of the ministers are camping in Jharsuguda. Perhaps, they will get grace marks as the party has done well in all by-elections except Dhamnagar, a leader quipped.
~ Bijoy Pradhan
New posts, but same old problems for Congress
After a long wait, the Congress high command finally announced a jumbo team of the state office-bearers recently. The party abolished the post of working president which had become all but irrelevant as out of the three, two had joined the BJD while the remaining one was not attending party programmes for a long time. But Congress always needs some big names to be rehabilitated in big posts. The party created a new post of senior vice-president and announced the name of senior leaders to fill them.
However, one appointee Tara Prasad Bahinipati has again raised a banner of revolt. Though the senior MLA has been made a senior vice-president and his wife a general secretary, he is not interested to join the new post. The reason, he thinks that this is a move by the party leadership to drop his wife from the post of president of the Koraput district Congress committee. Last heard OPCC president Sarat Pattanayak was trying to persuade Bahinipati to join the new post.
~ Bijay Chaki
