Days ahead of its release, former IAS officer Taradatt’s autobiography Highlanders’ Plainspeak: An Administrative Rede is causing consternation in Odisha’s political and bureaucratic circles. Excerpts carried in the media hold out the promise of a full-fledged expose with a potential to embarrass the Naveen Patnaik government and drill a hole into its claims of honesty, integrity and transparency. The juiciest bits have to do with a mega land scandal in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack worth hundreds (some estimates say thousands) of crores of rupees. As head of the task force hurriedly appointed by the state government to forestall a CBI inquiry, Taradatt had a ringside view of how precious land and flats were usurped by politicians, bureaucrats, judges of the high court, journalists and other influential people at throwaway prices under the now-shelved discretionary quota provision, flouting all rules and norms. All this happened with active connivance of the general administration department and government agencies such as the Odisha State Housing Board, the Bhubaneswar Development Authority and the Cuttack Development Authority.
Babu’s Barbs
The retired bureaucrat suggests that the period under inquiry was cleverly set from January 1, 1995, to December 31, 2014, allowing many powerful officers part of the scam before 1995 to go scot-free. “Only a handful of officials having received the benefit of discretionary quota or otherwise after 1.1.1995 suffered humiliation due to adverse publicity their names received selectively in print and electronic media, while the darker fish got away,” writes the officer, who had earned a reputation for honesty and uprightness.
Taradatt says his final report was sought to be passed off as an “interim” report in a desperate effort to push it into cold storage. Significantly, he drags Naveen directly into this brazen attempt to scuttle the report. He was “shocked”, he says, when Patnaik asked him to take more time in filing the report. In an interview to a website ahead of the book’s release, Taradatt rues that no action has been taken yet on the report he had worked so hard on.
The release, slated for December 18, could not have come at a worse time for the Naveen government, which is engaged in a complete image makeover exercise with initiatives like 5T and Mo Sarkar aimed at honest, transparent and people-friendly governance.
By Sandeep Sahu in Bhubaneswar