THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Chief Minister
Pinarayi Vijayan is famously a stickler for punctuality, and on Monday evening he didn’t give us a chance to change that opinion. At exactly 7.15pm, not a minute late than the original schedule, he entered the editorial conference room of The
Times of India as guest editor of the May 1 edition. “Yes, now tell me what I am supposed to do’’, he said matterof-factly as the editorial team greeted him and he eased himself into his new ‘job’.
Senior hands of the editorial team briefed him about major developments of the day and handed over to him the assorted list of news stories and pictures to pick from or reject. Soon, discussions began over the stories at hand, even as we waited for him to come up with different ideas.
He carefully listened to story briefs, made brief suggestions. The story on 1,147 out of 1,198 local bodies submitting their annual plans for the approval of district planning committees by March 31, 2018 excited him. “Yes, we have directed them to submit plans on time and most of them did that”, he clarified. The CM also sifted through the day’s pictures and right away identified the officers in the farewell function to DGP
Rajesh Dewan.
He took on a volley of questions from the editors in Thiruvananthapuram as the Kochi team joined the conference via video link.
As a communist leader occupying the seat of chief minister, where do you strike a balance between corporate-driven development and the cause of the proletarian?
There is not much difficulty in this. The fruits of development can reach to the last man. A major chunk of people need no help of the government for earning what they need. But the case is not so for the downtrodden. Job opportunities that comes with development would help them to improve their lives… some bad effects are natural. But we cannot afford to turn our back to development for some of its ill effects.
How do you rate the performance of the LDF government in the last two years? What score will you give to your government?
We could do many things. But the speed of action was not up to our expectation. We are trying to improve the speed. All sections of people are satisfied with our performance. We are like students who have written the examination and waiting for results.
Will there be a cabinet reshuffle?
We haven’t thought about that so far.
Would your government take a leadership position in resisting the 15th finance commission’s decision to consider 2011 census report for resource distribution?
We are of the stand that no state should be punished for the achievements that it has made. The decision to meet again at
Visakhapattanam is a good sign. All those who doesn’t carry the burden to show their allegiance to the BJP have come together against the move… Let’s hope that together we would be able to convince the finance commission.
Later, in his brief address to employees of TOI, Vijayan said journalists should criticise the government. “We welcome creative criticism. It would help the government to improve. But, of late the tendency is to criticise for the sake of criticism”, he said. He also wished the TOI all success.
