Money bridges language gap

There was apparently a communication gap in the meeting between the delegation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the members of the Patna Municipal Corporation. But money bridged it.s a foundation member spoke in English with American accent, the PMC representatives appeared clueless. Mention of money bridged the communication gap, though. The utterance of US$5 million appears to have raised the alert. “How much would US$5 million would be in rupees?” asked a senior corporator to another. Money, they say, has no language barrier.

CM has one more foe

Every politician in Bihar has friends-turned-foes. In the case of the RJD chief, Lalu Prasad, the present D (U) MP Ranjan Prasad Yadav is one. Chief minister Nitish Kumar’s several friends are his foes now. Some of them are Lallan Singh and Shambhu Srivastava. The latest to join the gang is the expelled MLC of the party Prem Kumar Mani. He has vowed to finish off Nitish politically alleging that his old associate had become power drunk. He appears unnerved by the fact that the man who he has vowed to finish off politically has just won 206 of the 243 seats. Nitish supporters pointed out that Mani’s utterances remind them of another former MLC and Nitish’s close associate P.K. Sinha. “Sinha went down swearing revenge, predicting doom for Nitish. He joined hands with virtually every political adversary Nitish had. The louder he swore the sharper was the rise of the political graph of Nitish. The problem begins when the moon thinks it is parallel to the sun,” said a JD (U) leader, dubbing Mani as another Sinha-in-the-making.

MLAs’ envy, MPs’ pride

After the Union finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, hiked the MPLAD funds to Rs 5 crore a year, the parliamentarians have become an envied lot in Bihar. Deputy chief minister Suhil Kumar Modi has dubbed the decision as unwise and said it would lead to the defeat of the sitting MPs because the voters’ expectations would rise. Most of the MLAs, however, believe the MPs are luckier han them. The move f the state government to increase the allotment of MLA schemes to s 2 crore comes with a lot of riders. The egislators are entitled only to recommend the schemes. They would have no role in their implementation. “The days of MLAs deciding who the contractor is appears to be over,” said an MLA.

Getting the acts right

When the CPI MLC, Kedar Nath Pandey, raised the issue of him not being allowed to meet the lady principal who allegedly tried to slap the Gopalganj district magistrate (DM), several ruling party MLCs, including those of the D (U), joined him to speak against the government. Their party heads did not take the matter lightly. Later, those MLCs were reportedly reprimanded for joining hands with the Opposition and were asked if they preferred to be with the Opposition. “The Gopalganj DM gave a perfect explanation on denying permission to meet the principal. He said since the lady was an undertrial the jail rules permitted her to meet just one a person in a week. The Opposition wants the state to go back to the Lalu era, when there was no law for jail inmates and they were allowed to move in and out of the jail at their will,” said a senior JD (U) leader.