Wary of voter mood, desperate Naveen doles out sops

By Sandeep Sahu Bhubaneswar: The announcement, timed to perfection, of the Rs 2-a-kg rice for BPL families by the Naveen Patnaik government is widely acknowledged to be the game changer that won the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) a thumping majority of 103 in an Assembly of 147 in the 2009 elections. But this time, things are different. Despite having announced in his Republic Day speech, well over a year ahead of the scheduled time for elections in the state, that his government would now make subsidised rice available to poor families at just Rs 1 a kg, Naveen is not too sure. In the days that followed, an uncertain Naveen, worried about the resurgence of sorts of the moribund Congress organisation on the one hand and the mischief potential of Pyari Mohan Mohapatra on the other, has embarked on an announcement spree doling out sops for all and sundry. Since the announcement of the Rs 1-a-kg rice scheme, hardly a week has gone past without Naveen announcing one dole or the other. Sample this. Among the more eye catching schemes announced to woo various segments of the electorate are mobile phones for nearly 20, 000 farmers, free bicycles and school uniforms for ST, SC boys and girls of all categories, Rs 10, 000 for each self-help group (SHGs) and youth club and free laptops for ST and SC students (a la Akhilesh Yadav). [caption id=“attachment_706696” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik. Image courtesy PIB[/caption] Then there are the more intangible schemes like pucca roads and electricity to all villages in the next three years, skill development training to nearly five lakh tribal youth to enhance their employability and the extension of the ‘Mamata’ scheme to cover pregnant women belonging to all categories in urban areas. In a desperate attempt to woo the disenchanted farmers, who have been at the receiving end of the Naveen government’s obsession with industrialisation, it even presented, for the first time ever, a separate budget for the agriculture sector last March. While the Rs-1-a kg rice scheme would entail an additional burden of Rs 180 crore a year on the state exchequer (over and above the Rs 820 it costs to provide rice at Rs 2-a-kg to nearly 37 lakh BPL families), the Youth Policy announced on 7 April, the day after the budget session of the Assembly, would make the state poorer by Rs 300 crore. Bureaucrats tasked with managing the state’s finances are at their wit’s end, worrying where to source the money to implement the Youth Policy since no provision has been made for it in the budget for 2013-14. For a government that has never tired of taking pride for having brought the state’s finances back on rails with some prudent financial macro management after the disastrous Congress rule between 1995-2000, when the state was living from day to day on overdrafts, the current profligacy is hard to defend. But then elections are not won on thin air. “Expect more such sops in the days to come,” says a cabinet minister. The results of the elections to the three newly carved notified area councils (NACs) of Atabira, Nuapada and Hindol have set the alarm bells ringing in the BJD camp. It lost all three NACs, far apart from each other, to a resurgent Congress in what is perhaps the first clear sign that the ruling party may have lost some of the support that it enjoyed in the last election and even after that. After all, the BJD has hardly lost even a minor election since it burst into power in the state at the beginning of the millennium. Even as late as February-March last year, three months before Pyari rebelled against Naveen and was consequently thrown out of BJD, the ruling party won over 70 percent of the gram panchyats and swept 28 out of the 30 Zila Parishads in the state. Clearly, a lot has happened in the last year or so for the party to be wary of the next Assembly elections. It is a moot point whether the series of sops and doles would help win enough votes for the BJD to come back to power without the crutches of troublesome allies. Naveen, however, appears to be pretty confident that they would do the job of fetching him the votes and can be trusted to come up with many more of them as election day nears. The transformation of Naveen, the new age politician, who justifiably won all-round acclaim for turning the financial situation around, into an old school politician who banks on sops to see him through is now complete.