Topic result for scandeep

Arvind Kejriwal hit the nail on the head on Thursday when he said there is no opposition in Odisha. There is a ruling party and two real or potential allies who have monopolized the entire political discourse among themselves for two decades leaving no scope for others to break in. But the big question is: […]

Till the time this piece was being written, there was no official word from the CBI that BJD MLAs Arun Sahu and Atanu Sabyasachi Nayak have indeed been served notices in connection with the chit fund scam. Though it was ‘breaking news’ on all local TV channels on Tuesday evening, the source for all of […]

What next for Srikant Jena? Of the two other major parties in Odisha, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) is unlikely to open its doors for the man who has just been shown the door by the Congress given what he has done in the past to the man in whose name the BJD has been […]

The season of fence-sitting is over. And the season of fence-jumping is on us in right earnest. Naba Das, the Jharsuguda strongman, was the first off the blocks and set the ball rolling by deserting the party that he has been associated with all his life on Wednesday and making it clear that he would […]

The Narendra Modi government may like to believe that the resignation of Alok Verma brings ‘closure’ to the unsavoury saga in the CBI stretching over several months. But is it really a closure? I am afraid the answer to this question has to be a resounding ‘No’. Already fraying at the edges, the bitter and […]

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 – […]

The difficult part was accomplished without much difficulty. But it’s such a shame that having done the seemingly unthinkable by actually entering the Lord Ayappa temple in Sabarimala in the wee hours of Wednesday, Bindu and Kanak Durga – the two bravehearts of Kerala – now cannot return home to resume their normal life. They […]

The appointment of Odisha born retired Tamil Nadu cadre IAS officer Shaktikanta Das as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor a day after the sudden and unexpected resignation of Urjit Patel, who still had nine month of his three-year term left, appears to have riled a lot of people. Given the unseemly tug of […]

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 […]

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 media loves nothing more than speculation. Anticipating and second guessing the supposed moves of political parties and leaders is what it revels in. In doing so, it is never deterred by the absence of an official word on such a move. [In fact, it dreads the ‘official’ word, because as and when it comes, […]

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 […]

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 […]

As the sordid details of the murky goings-on inside the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) keep tumbling out one after another, they help answer many of the questions that have been bothering those who have followed its track record over the years. Questions like why does the premier investigating agency, which boasts of the best […]

“I was asked to write about the Oriyas (Odias). What is there to write about these poor chaps? Ever since they got a thrashing at the hands of Ashoka in the battle of Kalinga, they have been a dejected lot. Now all they have with them are a lot of pots (Patras), big pots (Mahapatras) […]

With a large number of people living within or close to forests, the phenomenon of humans being killed by wild animals is not exactly uncommon in India. Human greed and rapacity has seen the country’s forest cover shrink rapidly since Independence, forcing wild animals to stray into human habitations in search of food with increasing […]

When something happens twice, it is coincidence. But when it happens, without fail, every single time on a dozen or so different occasions, there has to be something more than coincidence to explain it away. A few years ago, I returned from a party late at night and went straight to bed. On waking up […]

My first meeting with the man (it was more of an ‘encounter’ than a meeting, actually) was of the kind that remains etched in the mind for a lifetime. I had just joined as a trainee journalist in Eastern Media Limited (EML), which brought out ‘Sambad’, the first ‘morning’ daily in Odia. Since the house […]