Please Leave The Children Alone

By Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s rather frugal standards, this is going to be a marathon speech, lasting not less than 45 minutes. Since he would be addressing students – and more importantly their parents – of government and government aided schools across the state, one presumes he would speak (read out, to be more precise) […]

By Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s rather frugal standards, this is going to be a marathon speech, lasting not less than 45 minutes. Since he would be addressing students – and more importantly their parents – of government and government aided schools across the state, one presumes he would speak (read out, to be more precise) in Odia. For someone who begins sweating even while reading out an Odia text written in Roman script for five minutes, this one surely would be a Herculean effort with the attendant risk of tripping at some hard-to-pronounce (by his standards, that is) Odia words and causing a guffaw in the process.

If the Chief Minister has still decided to go ahead with doing something he has never done in his 17-year long reign, there has to be some solid reason for it. While the Chief Minister or anyone else in the state government is unlikely to come out with the reason, one can always look for possible clues in the circular that the Principal Secretary in the School and Mass Education department has sent to Collectors of all districts on November 2. The circular asks the Collectors - who also happen to be the Chairpersons of the RTE/SSA of the district – to ensure that ALL students of schools listen to the Chief Minister’s broadcast on November 14, Children’s Day. To make sure that nobody opts out of the broadcast on grounds of non-availability of TV sets, the letter enjoins upon the school headmaster and members of the school management committees (SMCs) to ‘contact villagers/parents having television set with set up (sic) box facilities to watch the programme.’