Under a cloud

PRAFULLA DAS

The Assembly Speaker resigns after accusations of sexual harassment against him and the alleged role of a Minister rock the government.

ALMOST everything was going smoothly for Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik. He had come out unscathed from several controversies surrounding his administration since he assumed power in 2000. He had warded off many accusations effortlessly and maintained his “Mr. Clean” image.

Then, in the last week of March, Patnaik came under pressure as never before when a suspended woman Assistant Marshal of the State Assembly, Gayatri Panda, brought sexual harassment charges against the Speaker, Maheswar Mohanty. Mohanty quit his post amid mounting protests from Opposition parties and women activists.

Patnaik has earned a reputation for being “clean” and he is feared as the leader of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) as he has never hesitated to take stern action against erring or tainted Ministers.

Patnaik, it is said, would sack anybody from his Ministry in order to save his own skin or the image of the BJD and the BJD-Bharatiya Janata Party government.

However, the first sexual harassment controversy to rock his Ministry saw the tough Chief Minister dither a bit before initiating action against the accused, primarily because it involved the Speaker and a close associate of Patnaik, a Minister who was accused of instigating the woman marshal.

Five days after the scandal pushed his government into turbulence, Patnaik sacked Information and Public Relations Minister Debasis Nayak without giving him a chance to resign on his own. The Chief Minister sent an official note to Governor Murlidhar Chandrakant Bhandare recommending the removal of Nayak. He said he dropped the Minister since he had lost confidence in him.

Mohanty’s resignation took place simultaneously. He said that he quit his post as the issue had rocked the Assembly, which was in session, and affected the dignity of the Chair. His disciplinary action against an “undisciplined employee” (the marshal was suspended) had resulted in her levelling false and baseless allegations against him, he insisted.

In the past, Patnaik has dismissed three Ministers; four of his Ministers were forced to quit under controversial circumstances. Half a dozen of his ministerial colleagues were shown the door at different points of time. Most of the Ministers who were relieved of their responsibilities during the past eight years belonged to the BJD.

The latest controversy began on the night of March 25 when some television channels flashed news clips in which the suspended woman marshal was shown levelling sexual harassment charges against Mohanty.

As soon as the House assembled the next morning, Mohanty read out a statement on his own denying the allegations. He, however, said that since the charges were of a serious nature he would not preside over the Assembly proceedings until the matter was investigated.

While suggesting that a House Committee be set up to inquire into the matter, Mohanty alleged that a conspiracy had been hatched to defame him and that some important persons were behind it. He said he would tell the whole story before the House Committee. The matter did not end there. In fact, Mohanty’s statement added fuel to the controversy.

The Opposition parties soon began to stall the proceedings. They demanded that no business of the Assembly should be held until the Speaker resigned from the post in order to facilitate an independent probe into the matter.

The next day, Opposition legislators occupied the Speaker’s podium as soon as the House assembled. Deputy Speaker Prahallad Dora, who was to take the Chair, waited at the entrance to the podium for more than an hour before finally returning to his chamber.

Despite desperate efforts by members of the ruling alliance and Dora to restore order, the Assembly proceedings were disrupted for four days with the Opposition legislators firm on their demand for the resignation of the Speaker and the institution of an independent inquiry into the scandal. They argued that a House Committee could not look into the matter as the issue involved the Speaker himself. The Opposition MLAs also demanded that the inquiry should probe the allegations made by the Speaker that the smear campaign was motivated by some important people.

While the House witnessed high drama over the issue, outside the Assembly there was no let-up in the controversy.

Panda sent her complaint to a women’s police station through a group of women activists. She alleged that the Speaker had made vulgar gestures at her several times. She even said that he had sent a vehicle to her house in the night and tried to persuade her through his driver and other staff to have sexual relations with him.

Since Panda did not lodge the complaint herself, the police took two days to verify her signature on the one-page plea and finally registered a case against the Speaker under Sections 506 (criminal intimidation), 507 (similar intimidation through telephone), 509 (lewd suggestions and obscene remarks) and 34 (common object) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

As the standoff continued, Patnaik left for New Delhi to attend a meeting of Chief Ministers of the mineral-bearing States. The controversy showed no sign of dying down until he returned on the third day.

Meanwhile, in Puri, the Speaker’s home constituency, BJD supporters of Mohanty took out a rally to protest against the slur cast on their leader, while Congress workers took out a rally demanding the Speaker’s resignation. Mohanty’s supporters squarely blamed Nayak, alleging that he had instigated Panda to make the allegations against their leader.

Some BJD workers also staged a demonstration in Bhubaneswar and made a strong demand for the resignation of Nayak. The cracks within the BJD became visible, and Naveen Patnaik, as the party’s president, was clearly in a fix.

With the controversy raging and demonstrations taking place against Mohanty and Nayak, the Assembly was adjourned sine die on March 31, two days ahead of schedule, after the State Budget for 2008-09 by voice vote. It was then that Patnaik was virtually forced to act tough.

Mohanty tendered his resignation hours after the Assembly was adjourned. The Chief Minister’s recommendation to the Governor was sent around the same time and it was also accepted immediately. But the controversy did not end with the resignation of Mohanty and the ouster of Nayak. It got further complicated.

The Opposition parties, which were in an upbeat mood as they sensed that the controversy had the potential to damage the image of the Chief Minister and his government, demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the matter. The government readily agreed to this demand. Meanwhile, women’s organisations stepped up their demand that Mohanty be arrested.

In an attempt to cash in on the controversy, the Opposition parties also announced that they would take the matter to the people. With the Assembly elections just a year away, the controversy is likely to affect the prospects of the ruling combine if it does not come to an end soon.

Everything will now depend on whether the suspended marshal fights it out or succumbs to pressure for a compromise.

Deathly inaction

PRAFULLA DAS
in Kashipur & Dasmantpur
The Orissa government’s apathy in providing health care makes cholera deaths a recurring phenomenon.

Young Ruai Majhi, a resident of Kucheipadar village in Kashipur block of Orissa’s Rayagada district, was eight months pregnant when her dreams of motherhood came tumbling down. She got seriously ill with cholera and was initially taken to the nearby primary health centre for treatment. But owing to the lack of adequate facilities there, she was rushed to the hospital at Tikiri. Doctors saved her but not her baby; she gave birth to a stillborn baby at the hospital the next day.

Ruai and her husband, Tankadhar Majhi, are happy that she survived cholera but are aggrieved that the absence of proper health care claimed their first child. “The doctor told me that I should be worried about my wife but not about the child that she was carrying,” Tankadhar said.

Subai Majhi of Ruai’s village met with the same fate. She survived cholera but lost her unborn baby. In the last week of August alone, the deadly disease claimed four lives, including that of a 35-year-old, in Kucheipadar, where tribal people form the majority.

The Kucheipadar health centre speaks volumes about the administrative neglect that leads to many diarrhoea and cholera deaths every year in this mineral-rich region during the monsoons. Established seven years ago, the health centre does not have a toilet, water or electricity. Ironically, there are power supply lines just a few metres away.

The lone post of doctor has also been lying vacant for the past one year. A doctor was posted and electricity provided after activists of the Prakrutika Sampad Suraksha Parishad and residents of Kucheipadar and nearby hamlets staged a roadblock on August 22 demanding help for the cholera-hit population. The authorities, who had been sleeping over people’s problems for years together, suddenly swung into action and got work started on a new tubewell in front of the health centre.

The Naveen Patnaik government makes frequent announcements about filling up of vacant posts of doctors in the backward Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput region of the State. But the Kucheipadar health centre had a doctor for just two years in the past seven years.

Against the sanctioned strength of 12 doctors in Kashipur, there are only three doctors at work. Similar is the situation in the Dasmantpur block in the neighbouring Koraput district. This place has three doctors against the required 11.

Although appointments are made, no doctor reports for duty and even the rare ones who join are keen to leave the area as early as possible. The prime reason for this is lack of basic amenities. Many health centres do not have residential accommodation for doctors. Or the houses do not have electricity and water.

In some areas, it is the fear of extremists that keeps the doctors away. Despite the government announcing incentives for them, doctors are not willing to work in the Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput region.

Early this year, the primary health centre at the block headquarters of Dasmantpur was upgraded to a community health centre. But it does not have a doctor on permanent posting. Two doctors drawn from two other primary health centres in the block are on duty here, leaving no one to attend to patients in their actual places of posting.

The Kashipur and Dasmantpur blocks did not have enough doctors even two full months after diarrhoea and cholera started claiming the lives of tribal people in the area. Cholera-related deaths in the two worst-hit blocks were first reported in the first week of July. The local administration and the State government reacted to the situation only in the third week of August. By then at least 100 people had died.

The district authorities, who were caught napping when reports started appearing in the media on the deaths, were clueless about the death toll. As correct information was not coming through official channels on the deaths occurring in distant hamlets, officials found it convenient to suppress the actual toll.

The State government claimed that only 178 persons succumbed to diarrhoea and cholera in Rayagada, Koraput, Kalahandi and Gajapati districts by September 4, but unofficial reports put the death toll at over 300. Bhagban Majhi, convener of the Prakrutika Sampad Suraksha Parishad, said that at least 180 persons had died in Kashipur block by the end of August. Majhi, who himself survived cholera, alleged that the authorities were deliberately keeping the figures low to save the government from embarrassment.

In Dasmantpur, leaders of both the Congress and the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) said that as many as 130 people died of cholera and diarrhoea by September 1. They said the health department, which was suppressing the exact number of deaths, would have a tough time issuing death certificates to the kin of those who died in the epidemic.

Squarely blaming the BJD-Bharatiya Janata Party coalition government for its failure to cope with the epidemic, Taraprasad Bahinipati, the Congress legislator representing Koraput, said the authorities had ignored his repeated requests to fill up the vacant posts of doctors in Dasmantpur. “Only a permanent solution to the problems ailing the health sector in the region can prevent deaths in the coming years,” he said. The prime reasons for so many diarrhoea deaths in the region are a weak health care system, absence of safe drinking water and non-availability of employment opportunities. When 20 people died of cholera in Kashipur block in August 2001, the Naveen Patnaik government announced that it would improve the health infrastructure in the region. But it still remains a promise.

Contaminated water and total absence of health care in the region are the reasons for the large number of deaths of tribal people during the monsoons every year. The rural water supply scheme has failed to meet the people’s needs. Hundreds of tubewells are defunct in the Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput region.

The latest report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) makes the government’s apathy clear. It says: “Out of 74,020 wells targeted during the period 2001-06, 65,680 wells were constructed. Of these, 27,316 tubewells (42 per cent) were found to be discharging water with high iron/fluoride/chloride contents, rendering them unfit for drinking. Several piped water supply schemes remained incomplete for one to 14 years due to failure of water sources, deviations during execution, constraints of funds, etc. There was a general disregard to the government’s instructions regarding testing the quality of water through trial bores before installation of tubewells.”

Water is not tested and monitored periodically. “Water quality of 0.40 lakh sources in 0.28 lakh habitations was found unsafe for drinking. Around six lakh people were affected by water borne diseases during 2002-05,” the CAG report says.

This is not all. Many tubewells have water only during the rainy seasons. Local people alleged that though the authorities claim that the tubewells are sunk 100 feet (30 metres) or below, the real depth was around 70 ft (20 m). This is the main reason for water scarcity and contamination, they said.

The less said the better about the employment generating schemes. In Rayagada and Koraput, there are signboards announcing developmental works being carried out under the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana (SGRY) and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). But the schemes have made no substantive difference to the lives of the people.
Hundreds of hamlets do not have roads. The roads laid in interior areas are in bad shape and the water harvesting structures are not maintained well.

The CAG report also clearly outlines the faulty implementation of employment generation schemes“Review of implementation of Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana (SGRY) in the State during the period 2001-06 showed serious deficiencies in implementation of the programme.

The Government failed in adhering to the scheme guidelines for efficient financial and food grains management, leading to loss of Central assistance, misutilisation of scheme funds, shortage and pilferage of food grains. Contractors were extensively used in the guise of Village Labour Leaders (VLL) and prohibited works/non-durable assets/idle assets were created. Man-days generation was hypothetically arrived at without linking to the actual generation as per the muster rolls. Serious irregularities existed in payment of wages. There was no dedicated monitoring mechanism at the State level to review and evaluate the implementation of the scheme.”

The Centre for Environment and Food Security (CEFS), a Delhi-based organisation that had conducted a survey of 100 villages to assess the implementation of the NREGS, said that it was not the epidemic of cholera but the cancer of corruption that was killing hundreds of poor tribal people and crippling millions of them.

Alleging that government officials had misappropriated Rs.500 crore of NREGS funds, the CEFS said this amount would have given about 90 days of employment to 10 lakh poor families in Orissa.“It is not just another financial scam. Callous officials of Orissa have robbed 10 lakh hungry families of one meal a day for a whole year or two meals for six months,” it said.

Death at the doorstep

ORIA KANJIKA (35) of Pajar village in Dasmantpur block of Koraput district was shell-shocked when his father died of cholera at the community health centre on August 31. The disease had already claimed the lives of his mother and seven-year-old son in the days before that.

Oria was even scared to touch the body of his father for fear of contracting cholera. His father, Saiba Kanjika, caught the disease soon after his mother’s funeral at the cremation ground on the outskirts of their village.

With only one villager accompanying him to the hospital 20 km away from his village, Oria needed help to take his father’s body back home. But help was difficult to come by.

His request to the hospital authorities to arrange a vehicle to transport the body was met only on September 1 afternoon, a full 19 hours after the death. The hospital did not even have an ambulance. The private vehicle that had been hired by the government for its operations to tackle the epidemic came only after the intervention of District Collector Balakrushna Sahu.

More than anything else, Oria was worried about his wife and a remaining son and a daughter.

Uncertainty and fear of further cholera attacks in the family were writ large on his face.
Oria said the family did not have enough land to eke out a living. They also did not have a below poverty line (BPL) card. “We have been waiting for a BPL card for the past six years,” he said.

As shifting cultivation on his own land did not give him enough yield, Oria worked as a casual labourer whenever work was available in the area. He said there was no work since a watershed project under the food-for-work programme was completed in June.

From the little he earned, he paid Rs.25 every alternate month to a family possessing a BPL card to use it to draw 25 kg of rice at Rs.4 a kilo.

Oria’s is not an isolated case in Pajar village. Four others succumbed to the disease in the village, which has only 85 families, and many were undergoing treatment for cholera at different hospitals.

Tears rolled down Oria’s cheeks when he left for his village in the vehicle that carried the body of his father. Meanwhile, more and more patients were being brought to the hospital from far off hamlets.
Prafulla Das

Where are the NGOs?

THE question that hit the mind as one went round government health centres and cholera-affected villages in the two backward blocks of Kashipur and Dasmantpur in Orissa was: Where are the NGO leaders?

Though hundreds of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) claim to have been working for the welfare of the poor in the interior pockets of Orissa, not one could be spotted over two days on August 31 and September 1. NGO leaders, the latest coinage denoting those leading NGOs, were not visible at all.

On the second day, this correspondent saw a few volunteers of an international voluntary organisation sitting in their vehicles loaded with medicines outside the Dasmantpur community health centre. The visiting NGO team vanished soon after handing over some medicines to the local health department officials.

In Dasmantpur, where NGOs operating in the region were not found in action, the office-bearers of some political parties were playing the role of Good Samaritans. Although the Biju Janata Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party had done very little to prevent the cholera deaths, the president of the BJD’s Dasmantpur block unit, Narayan Bisoi, came down heavily on NGOs.

“All the 16 gram panchayats under Dasmantpur block have been affected by the cholera and diarrhoea that surfaced in the first week of July. The district administration has been trying to extend some help to the affected people during the past two weeks, but NGOs have not reached the spot so far,” Bisoi said on September 1.

In Kashipur the previous day, as NGO workers remained elusive, the only person found rendering voluntary service to cholera patients at the Tikiri primary health centre was Bhagirathi Behera, a local person.

“I have not brought any patient. But I have been cleaning the health centre premises and taking care of the cholera affected for the past 10 days,” Behera said.

On September 4, Sanhati, a federation of 65 NGOs of Orissa, came out with a report of a fact-finding team that it had sent to the cholera-affected villages in Rayagada and Koraput. More than 250 people had died of diarrhoea, it said.

The organisation, which said its team visited the affected villages from August 31 to September 3, blamed the district administration for its failure to implement social security programmes and welfare schemes.

Maintaining a deliberate silence on the role of NGOs in such a crisis, the four-member Sanhati fact-finding team accused the district administration of failing to mobilise civil society organisations to tackle the situation. The team further claimed that there was no cholera since 1987 because of the coordination between the government and NGOs.

The district administration, “for obvious reasons”, was now deliberately avoiding the involvement of the NGOs working in the region to mitigate the disaster, the Sanhati team alleged.

Sanhati’s allegation that the administration was deliberately avoiding the NGOs may be true. However, the NGOs, a majority of which are headquartered in the State capital, Bhubaneswar, and other urban centres, seem to be more concerned about policy decisions than being with the people.

The voluntary work of yesteryear appears to have turned into an armchair affair.
Prafulla Das