Tirath’s turn to do a Mamata

After Mamata Banerjee filled up key posts in her railway ministry with people from Bengal, her ministerial colleague Krishna Tirath’s has taken upon herself to show faith in Delhiites.

Updated on: Sep 27, 2009, 23:42:19 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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“My ministry, my state” syndrome, it seems, is spreading.

After Mamata Banerjee filled up key posts in her railway ministry with people from Bengal, her ministerial colleague Krishna Tirath’s has taken upon herself to show faith in Delhiites.

As Women and Child Development Minister, Tirath has nominated eight members to the Central Social Welfare Board. Seven of them are from the Capital.

Tirath represents North-West Delhi in the Lok Sabha, while Banerjee is the Member of Parliament from the Kolkata South, West Bengal. Tirath named the members to the board without consulting chairperson Prema Karappa, a Rajya Sabha member from Karnataka.

Karappa said she didn’t know who were nominated to the board. “I was not consulted and I don’t know why.” The procedure says that the chairperson should be consulted, she said.

The board, which gets close to Rs 110 crore from the Centre for welfare schemes for women and children, was set up in 1956 by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The mandate: to give national social policy a national perspective.

The objective is obviously lost, as except for the chairpersons all the nominated members are from Delhi. Being part of the board’s executive body, these members are responsible for its day-to-day functioning.

Former Delhi Metropolitan Council (replaced by Delhi assembly) speaker Purshotam Goel, country’s first woman Indian Police Service officer Kiran Bedi and former National Commission for Women chairperson Mohini Giri have been nominated under the category of eminent persons with extensive experience in social work.

Journalist-turned-social activist Sreerupa Mitra Chaudhary, nutrition expert Dr Mira Shiva and a child psychologist Vandana Roy-Mittal have been named under the category of professional experts.

“All of them have extensive experience in their areas of work,” said a senior ministry official, defending the move. The official refused to be identified, saying the nominations were made on the recommendation of the minister and not bureaucrats.

And, this is only the beginning. Tirath will soon be making more appointments and if officials are to be believed, more Delhiwallas can hope to be “gainfully employed”.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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