Tag: Scandeep

In his death, Atal Bihari Vajpayee may have provided the BJP just the shot in the arm it needed ahead of the 2019 elections. While he was alive and ailing, very few in the party bothered about him. In fact, it is entirely possible that had he not been ailing and confined to his home, […]

Now that the High Court has struck down the October 22, 2017 notification issued by the state government insisting on an affidavit to be furnished by the agitating teachers before they become eligible for revised pay under the grant-in-aid (GIA) policy as violative of the fundamental rights granted to all citizens under Articles 14 & […]

It all sounds so eerily familiar. Three members of a tribal family die in a span of 18 hours after consuming a gruel made of fermented mango kernel in Mainapadar village in Jharigaon block of Nabarangpur district. And within an hour or so of the last of the three deaths, a minister is quick to […]

Trust the Modi government to come up with one crazy idea after another. As if the ambitious – but foolish – decision to go for a bullet train, costing upwards of Rs. One lakh crore, wasn’t bad enough, it has now given ‘in-principle’ consent to the proposal for setting up a ‘sea aerodrome’ at Chilika […]

We had all hoped against hope that Abdul Rahman, who was arrested by Delhi Police in December, 2015 for his alleged links with Al Qaeda, was the last we would hear about terror’s connections in the Land of Jagannath. But that hope has been rudely shattered with the arrest of Kendrapara resident Habibur Rahman by […]

Last week, the appointment of senior IPS officer Satyajit Mohanty as the Commissioner of Twin City police replacing YB Khurania made big news in the local media. As soon as the announcement was officially made, it was splashed across TV channels as ‘Big Breaking’/’Breaking News’. All TV channels went live when the new police chief […]

Laxmidhar is distraught. The man from Tigiria, who looks after his family of five with the paan-cum-tea shop he runs below the under-construction Lingaraj Vihar flyover in Bhubaneswar, is about to be squeezed out of his place. “Where shall we go? Please do something for us. Sir,” pleads Laxmidhar, not ready to believe that there […]

As the circumstances leading to the death of Rakbar Khan, who was lynched by a ‘gau rakshak’ mob in Alwar in Rajasthan on Saturday night on suspicion of illegally carrying cattle, come to the fore, it is becoming increasingly clear that his life could have been saved had the cops been a little less callous […]

The ‘Smart City’ had never seen anything like it before. Marooned people being rescued by fire and ODRAF personnel; bikes, cars and even buses with passengers floating in water bang in the middle of busy roads; people having to move upstairs after inundation of the ground floor and going without electricity, food and drinking water […]

As the sordid details of how gangster Syed Usman Ali alias ‘Tito’ built his Empire of Crime unravels layer by layer, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Kendrapara don flourished with active political patronage at every stage. The similarities of Tito’s case with the rise and fall of the Dhalasamant brothers, who ran a […]

When in trouble, tug at Odia pride. That was exactly what the president of the contractors’ association Prabhat Das was trying to do when he laid the blame squarely on the alleged love for non Odia contractors among officials and engineers of the Works department for the mishap at the Bomikhal overbridge last night that […]

To use a cricketing term, it came against the run of play. Just when detractors of Prasad Harichandan were beginning to reconcile themselves to working under him at least till the next elections came the decision to replace him with Niranjan Patnaik. By all accounts, even Patnaik appeared to have reconciled himself to having his […]

If the first one in 2016 was announced on TV by no less than Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the current round appears to be an ‘undeclared’ demonetisation. Mamata Banerjee’s claim about a ‘financial emergency’ in the country may be dismissed as political hyperbole. But there is little doubt that the cash crunch that has hit […]

As the spine chilling details of the Kathua gang rape case make it to the mainstream media, comparisons are inevitably being drawn with the horrific Nibhaya gang rape case of Delhi in 2012. But there are at least three reasons why the latest case is more abominable and a greater shame on humanity than the […]

There comes a time in everyone’s life when one cannot help feeling a little inflated. And let me confess today was one such moment for me. Addressing a motley crowd of journalism students, some of them older than me, at the Odisha State Open University in Sambalpur was certainly a privilege for someone who has […]