Bhubaneswar: Odisha’s previous Naveen Patnaik government which uninterruptedly ruled the state from 2000 to 2004, spent Rs 452.96 crore from the state exchequer for advertisements in the last five years. This amount, among others, includes Rs 15.26 crore given for releasing specific advertisements that carried the photograph of Naveen Patnaik along with his blue-eyed boy V Kathikeyan Pandian, a bureaucrat whom Naveen had appointed as 5T secretary.
The acronym 5T stands for Teamwork, Transparency, Technology, Time, and Transformation. In 2019, Naveen Patnaik had created this governance model and appointed Pandian as its secretary ostensibly to give him the authority to put all other secretaries under his administrative control.
Responding to a question from BJP MLA Laxman Bag, chief minister Mohan Charan Majhi said in the Odisha Legislative Assembly advertisements with the pictures of Naveen Patnaik and V K Pandian were released between 2023 and April 2024.
According to sources, the money was spent by the various departments of the Odisha government to use Pandian’s photos in the ads.
While Rs 15.26 crore was spent on print media ads for promoting Pandian, details about the expenses on electronic and digital media ads is yet to be known.
Questions are being raised in political and other circles as to how and under whose directive such a huge amount of money was used for the promotion of a secretary-level officer.
According to experts, creation of the 5T secretary post sans creating departmental cadre structures was an illegal exercise by the former chief minister Naveen Patnaik. That department lacked a mandatory code that is given by the Auditor General of India.
Political analysts believed that BJP may also launch an investigation into the expenses of the previous BJD government in promoting Pandian through these ads.
Earlier, the Mohan Majhi government had also assured an investigation into Pandian’s whirlwind tours across Odisha after RTI query revealed that crores of rupees was spent on his chopper rides.
