Patna,(BiharTimes): As Jitan Ram Manjhi flies to England to deliver a lecture in London School of Economics, just four months after becoming the chief minister, he is being bombarded by various political opponents and common men and women of Patna as he is leaving the city in a hellish condition.
Be it the CPI ML general secretary, Dipankar Bhattacharya, leader of opposition in the state Assembly, Nand Ksihore Yadav and another BJP leader Sanjay Mayukh, all are questioning the timing of his visit which no-doubt was a pre-planned one.
The chief minister, while replying to the media’s question on Friday evening (after his return from Rajgir where he went to inaugurate Nalanda University), said that he was going there to seek investment for the state.
But will the investors really come to this huge 30 square kilometer cesspool called Patna.
Of all the persons it is the BJP leaders who are critical of the visit to London to attend the annual conference of International Growth Centre. What they failed to answer is that the then deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi had also attended one such conference, and only he can answer how much investors has come from England. Vijay Chaudhary too had attend one such meet.
Dr Shaibal Gupta, member-secretary of Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI) took the Resident Editor of a English daily with him to attend some other IGC meet.
So Manjhi is not the first one to do so. When Nitish Kumar went to Mauritius in July 2007 Bihar was reeling under flood. Then nobody would dare to write anything because it was a different era. An English daily came out with a fantastic story and blamed the nature for it. It came out with a figment of imagination stating that Bihar had that year witnessed more than 700 mm of rain in just a couple of months of monsoon and that it is much higher than the figure of entire season.
What that poor reporter forgot is that Bihar witnesses at least 1100 to 1200 mm of rain and not 700 mm annually.
Nitish visited China, Bhutan and Pakistan to seek more investments, get hydel power plants built and improve cultural ties. Whether he succeeded or not may never be known?
Anyway Manjhi’s mistake is that he flew to London just a month after he stalled a similar visit to that city by his new and young urban development minister, Samrat Chaudhary. In August he was to go to the United Kingdom to study solid waste management, sewerage treatment plants and town planning practices. The chief minister had then said that Samrat should not leave the country when the people of Patna are battling waterlogging.
Samrat was perhaps wrong in the choice of city. He should have sought permission to visit Paris instead of London to see whether Patna has become as beautiful as the French capital. Only nine years back the then urban development minister Ashwini Choubey had promised to make Patna as beautiful as Paris. He, along with 10 other of his party’s colleagues remained in the Nitish cabinet for seven and a half long years, yet the situation in Patna turned from bad to worse.