July 16, 2015
100th administrative meeting – Extract of BBC story
Chief Minister of the state of West Bengal and one of India’s leading politicians, Mamata Banerjee achieved an unusual distinction today by attending her one hundredth ‘administrative review meeting’ outside of her designated office.
Her office claims that she is the first leader ever to have addressed one hundred formal review meetings during her tenure – and emphasises that she has accomplished this away from the administrative headquarters.
”This is ‘century’ of a different sort, where all the runs were collected in ‘away’ matches”, says MP Derek O’Brien, Parliamentary leader of Ms Banerjee’s party Trinamool Congress.
The state of West Bengal has traditionally been governed from the iconic Writers’ Building in Calcutta, which was built for writers or clerks of the British East India Company in 1977. The red-brick heritage building is reminiscent of when Calcutta was in its heydey as the capital of British India.
Mamata Banerjee’s government moved out of the historic building two years ago to allow for the much-needed renovation of the 238-year-old building. Her new secretariat, ‘Nabanna’, is a mere high-rise building across the river Ganges.
However, Ms Banerjee has shown that she prefers to conduct meetings away from either the Writers’ Building or Nabanna – to the point where she has now reached a milestone by presiding over the one hundredth meeting in Burdwan, a district town 100 kilometerss away from Calcutta.
The Chief Minister’s office claims that she has touched upon every single district of West Bengal in this process and that this is a remarkable achievement in allowing the ‘devolution of power’ to grassroots movements.
