CUTTACK: Political atmosphere has begun picking up pace in Baramba Assembly constituency with senior BJD leader Debi Prasad Mishra along with the party’s Cuttack MP Santrupt Misra filing his nomination in the office of the Athagarh sub-collector on Tuesday.
The interesting part, though, is the 66-year-old senior BJD leader has this time locked horns with two new faces, Sambit Kumar Tripathy of BJP and Sanjay Kumar Sahoo of Congress.
A six-time winner from the Assembly segment, Mishra has been representing the seat consecutively for the last six terms since 1995, the first being as a Janata Dal nominee and the remaining five terms since 2000 as a BJD candidate. The Baramba Assemby segment comprises 75 gram panchayats including 38 GPs in Baramba and 37 GPs in Narasinghpur.
Forty-eight-year-old Tripathy, a native of Krushanchandrapur in Baramba block, had earlier worked as a private secretary to Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. After taking voluntary retirement from his job as an IRS officer in 2020, Tripathy joined BJP a year back.
Apart from actively engaging in several voluntary works in his native constituency for the last one year, Tripathy has also helped farmers gain profit by adopting modern methods of farming.
The saffron party has denied ticket to Bijay Dalabehera who had contested unsuccessfully in the 2019 Assembly polls bagging 72,545 votes as against the senior BJD leader who polled 90,564 votes. Under Dalabehera’s leadership, BJP had won seven of the eight zilla parishad seats in the three-tier panchayat election. Dalabehera said he would contest as an Independent if the party failed to reconsider his candidature.
Meanwhile, Congress candidate Sanjay Kumar Sahoo of Champeswar said he has dedicated his life for the party serving people of the Baramba constituency. “After getting ticket, I have tried to unite all Congress workers to regain victory the party had witnessed in 1980 and 1985 and fighting the polls assuring voters for the re-establishment of Baramba Sugar Mill,” Sahoo said.