Two Decades and Counting

As Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik completes 20 years in office, the state government is scripting another chapter in a series of developmental programmes for the state, this time focusing on knowledge-based industries and manufacturing

- DIVYA J SHEKHAR

Odisha was in darkness when the world was celebrating the dawn of a new millennium in 2000, says R Balakrishnan, an IAS officer who was then posted in Odisha. A cyclone had uprooted electricity poles and millions of trees; it had destroyed homes, swept away entire villages and killed over 10,000 people. In the preceding years, the parched district of Kalahandi in south-west Odisha had become globally infamous as a symbol of starvation, malnourishment, and poverty. It was under these circumstances that the state had elected Naveen Patnaik as chief minister (CM). A man who, until then, had lived in the US, written three non-fiction books, and was a reluctant inheritor of the political legacy of his father, Biju Patnaik.

“People’s self-confidence was at its lowest when Naveen Patnaik took over. The rest of the country bracketed Odisha as a backward state suffering from starvation, poverty and natural calamities,” says Balakrishnan, now an advisor to the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO). “In the last 20 years, breaking those stereotypes has been this man’s greatest achievement.”

At 74, Patnaik is today one of the longest-serving CMs in India. Through consistent welfare schemes, a clean governance image, sidestepping controversies and following development narrative, his party Biju Janata Dal (BJD) has defied anti-incumbency and people have re-elected him for five consecutive terms. In the 2019 Assembly elections, the party secured 113 out of 147 seats; the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was a distant second with 23 seats.