BeatsNBytes: ‘Yaas, We Are Ready’

Cyclone Yaas is headed menacingly towards north Odisha and adjoining West Bengal coasts as we write. The storm promises to pack a deadly punch with wind speeds expected to reach 185 kmph.

Well, for Odisha it’s that time of the year again if not business as usual. Never mind if May is the new October since the last couple of years.

That the state’s battle-hardened disaster management team is down to serious business as it goes through the drill seeking to ensure zero casualty is no longer news.

‘Hey Yaas, we are ready’ was indeed Odisha’s message to the potentially deadly storm when special relief commissioner Pradeep Jena tweeted, ‘I am back’ and added he had meetings with 10 major stakeholders, including NDRF and collectors of districts likely to be in the storm’s firing line. This was on May 19. Incidentally, the bureaucrat and a key member of the cyclone war room was, discharged from a COVID hospital on May 17 after successfully beating the virus.

‘Hitting the ground running,’ would surely beg a new definition after the SRC’s superhuman feat. Except that it’s normal for Odisha’s well-oiled cyclone mitigation machinery.

Street Corner Talk

Notwithstanding Odisha’s impressive disaster management record in recent years, there would always be cynics. One of whom remarked sagely, though rather unoriginally: “Storms draw something out of Odisha that calm seas don’t.” It took another cynic to point out that there was a corona storm raging inland. “So caught between the devil and the deep sea, are you?” the other retorted. We left the stormy exchange because we had to buy candles and check on the oxygen levels of some dear ones. Besides, as some wise guy said, “There are some things you can learn only in a storm.”

Podium Is The Message

Messaging is the key to proactive governance. Facing flak over the static caseload, under-reporting of fatalities and poor enforcement of lockdown, the Odisha government decided it was time to send some right messages. A senior health department mandarin duly took the stage and declared with suitable pomposity that cases were up because testing was up. Little did he realize that Odisha read his hard to decode words as: Cases were actually going up and testing had remained low. In any case, he had handed critics the trigger they needed and the matter has not rested ever since.

Sarkari babus then did a trapeze act. Quietly leaping over the fatalities part, they continued with their cemetery and grave hunt at major urban centres. But they went hard on the enforcement issue, narrowing the relaxation window by two hours. So people could start their shopping and other chores an hour late and finish up an hour early.

Why?

To keep the virus away, silly!

Meanwhile, what the health official said about cases and testing should serve as a lesson in media management classes:

“…see 80 per cent of ICUs are filled while around 50 per cent of ventilators are filled, which means we do have serious patients and there will be proportionate deaths. However, at the end of the day, if we look at the fatalities in the last 15-20 days, we can know the increase in the case fatality.”

Comprehending James Joyce must have been way easier!

Political One-upmanship

If Narendra Modi knows how to gain mileage from government schemes, can Naveen Patnaik be far behind? On May 14, hours after the premier announced the transfer of Rs 2000 each (totalling Rs 556 crore) to nearly 28 lakh farmers in the state under the PM Kisan Yojana, the Odisha CM declared the release of Rs 920 crore to 42 lakh farmers under the state-sponsored KALIA Yojana. When Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said the state government should ensure all registered farmers take full advantage of the central scheme, the ruling BJD grabbed the opportunity to score a brownie point. “Landless farmers and share-croppers should also be included under PM Kisan like the KALIA Yojana. It would benefit more households,” BJD organising secretary Pranab Prakash Das tweeted.

All this on the eve of Akshaya Tritiya, an agrarian festival, and at the peak of COVID pandemic clears shows there is no love lost between the two parties. Or, is it not?

Who’s The Boss?

If anyone had any doubts about who calls the shots in Odisha, then FIH possibly helped in clearing it. The international hockey association by announcing its president’s award to V K Pandian, private secretary to Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, dropped broad hints at who is currently ‘holding the stick’ in the eastern state. While power play is a term more associated with cricket, it surely does impact the stick game too. But can Narinder Batra helming FIH and Odisha Tourism finding its place in the FIH website as a sponsor be incidental to the script? Well, why drag and dribble when certain things can be best kept secret!