Opinion News Updates

There is no doubt that the ‘equi-distance’ jumla has served the interests of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) very well over the last few years. On the one hand, it has helped the ruling party to keep fooling the people of Odisha with the pretence of neutrality. On the other, it has also kept the […]

Let us not allow ourselves to be distracted by the needless – and ill-timed – debate over whether this was ‘bigger than 1983’ or whether Virat is ‘greater’ than Sachin. Those debates can wait for another day. Right now, it’s time to rejoice, celebrate and revel in the sweet smell of victory. After all, it […]

Poor Pradeep Maharathy! In a travesty of the criminal jurisprudence system, the ‘former’ Agriculture minister of Odisha has just earned the dubious distinction as the only member of the Odisha cabinet to be punished twice for the same ‘crime’. Having to resign twice – once on January 19, 2012 and then again on Sunday – […]

It is competitive populism at its worst. After the newly elected Congress governments in the heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh announced waiver of farm loans, every political party is now jumping on to the waiver bandwagon. At the national level, the Modi government, which had resisted all pressures to write off agricultural […]

Let us put the state government aside for a moment and stop doing a post-mortem of what it did or didn’t do, whether it did right or wrong, what it could have and couldn’t have done and so on. Here is a poser for every English reading Odia who happens to read this piece. Should […]

There are many reasons why Naveen Patnaik remains head and shoulders over all other politicians in Odisha, faces little threat of anti-incumbency as he braces for his fifth successive term as Chief Minister and has no challenger in sight in the horizon. The most important of these reasons, however, is his ability to constantly reinvent […]

The year was 1986. One fine evening, Muna Patnaik, my good friend who shared a room with me at the time, came rushing into the room in a highly excited state. When I asked him the reason for his excitement, he handed me a bunch of papers instead of answering my question. As I curiously […]

The cat is out of the bag. The worst kept secret of the august house called Vidhan Sabha came tumbling out of the hallowed precincts of the Odisha Assembly on Tuesday evening when two leading channels – OTV and News 7 – ran a story on how Parliamentary Affairs minister Bikram Keshari Arukh and the […]

Can a bureaucrat – or anyone anyone holding a public office for that matter – eject a reporter from a briefing for the media on the grounds of ‘biased’ coverage? Or pick and choose which media outlet s/he would talk to? The answer, I am afraid, has to be an emphatic and unambiguous ‘No’! It […]

One of the major factors behind the landslide victory for Naveen Patnaik and his party in the 2014 elections was the overwhelming support of women. Naveen himself acknowledged as much in his first reaction after the win. Though the exact extent of women’s support for the BJD in that election is not known, estimates put […]

The stars of the business world, who descended on Bhubaneswar for the second edition of the Make in Odisha conclave, must have been quite impressed with what they saw in the Smart City: freshly coated roads, smartly dressed traffic personnel, the swanky hotels, the glitzy shopping arcades and, last but not the least, the hi-tech […]

For a whole generation of Odias growing up in the seventies and eighties, Chitta Jena’s was the voice of the ultimate romantic. While other stalwarts of the era like Akshay Mohanty, Sikandar Alam and Pranab Patnaik were all versatile singers, there was something in the voice of Chitta Jena that made him special for anyone […]

The flurry of gift-dispensing activity seen across Odisha on the occasion of Diwali revives the age old question: when does a ‘gift’ stop being a gift and become ‘illegal gratification’? This question, in turn, spawns a host of other related questions. What determines the nature of a gift – the price of the article, the […]

Utterances by politicians – and economists – on the second ‘death anniversary’ of the Rs. 1000 note have been on predictable lines. Depending on which side of the political divide they are, these wise heads have either been heaping praise on the Modi government for this ‘bold’ move that allegedly marked a ‘turning point’ in […]

The virtual confirmation on Sunday that the tiger killed by poachers in the Debrigarh forests in Bargarh district was a Royal Bengal Tiger (RBT) – and not a leopard, as the Forest minister and the PCCF (Wildlife) had sought to pass it off as – raises the inevitable question: why is the Forest department so […]