Appeal on the IIT issue
May 18th, 2007
Dear Readers of this site:
Lalit Patnaik, the working president of Agami Orissa met the CM as well as minister Chandrasekhar Sahu. They both highly appreciated what we common people have been doing on the IIT issue. They suggested that we should do that even more vigorously. It was conveyed that at the PM level the efforts of common people have a much bigger impact than efforts by party cadres. Hence my appeal to all of you to write or fax letters to the PM and copy it to to the CM as well as minister Chandrasekhar Sahu. Sample copies of letters are available at http://iitorissa.org.
Relevant addresses and fax numbers:
Entry Filed under: IIT Kharagpur branch in Bhubaneswar,IIT, oDishA
2 Writeup
1. Debu | May 19th, 2007 at 11:18 am
What an excuse !!! Why people elect their representatives to the assembly / parlement ? Its the moral duty of the elected members to fight for their people and not the public to fight for every cause. How CM can advice to general public to flood PM office with vigorous way rather than taking a wining stand and demanding an IIT with all reasonable cause.
Its a obvious fact that a FAX / Surface-Mail which reach in PM office is not going to be watched by Manmohan Singh. There must be a several grade of secretaries handeling these papers. PM office must be receiving thousands of such papers everday depending upon thousand incidents / demands and if PM is going to read everything then he is gone !!
Flooding of emails / surface mails / Fax has its own demerit.
2. Chitta Baral | May 19th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Dear Debu babu:
I wrote the following in http://equitableindia.org
“in the Indian parliamentary system, the ministers are selected from the ruling coalition. Thus if a state’s MPs (members of parliament) are not part of this ruling coalition then that state has a much lesser clout. Finally, a government sponsored bill, if it fails in the parliament, then the government has to resign thus forcing ruling coalition MPs to vote for their government bills or risk being thrown out of their party. Thus after an election the ruling coalition does not need to care what the MPs of other parties think; it can give more resources to the states which have more MPs aligned to it or is ruled by an allied party and ignore or even punish states which have only a few or no MPs aligned to it and are not ruled by an allied party. ”
Under these circumstances, the legislators can do a lot of halla-gulla but not much beyond that. The CM has to be cordial to the planning commission and the ministers as he has to beg for lots of different things from different ministries. The minister from Orissa has to convey that it is a genuine demand from the people and things organized by political parties by bused in cadres are always suspect.
So the people’s voice counts a lot. Sending letters and faxes (emails are not so good) are a good way of expressing that voice. It certainly will not be read by the PM himself, but a sample may be read and conveyed to him. Also, if copies are sent to the CM and the Congress minister from Orissa, they can use that to strengthen their argument with the PM.
Having said that, the CM, the MPs, and the Congress minister must continue their efforts and do more and not pass the buck to the common people.