Bhubaneswar, July 30: Can a government afford to be a deliberate under-performer? Does such an antithetical phenomenon ever happen?  If your answer is ‘yes,’ then one may ask you again — “What for?”

If you are still pondering over the answer, let’s examine Odisha’s panchayati raj minister Rabi Narayan Naik’s reply in the Odisha Legislative Assembly on Tuesday. In his reply, Naik brought to the light the previous Biju Janata Dal (BJD) government’s inability to provide pucca houses to the targeted beneficiaries even though the Centre had granted an adequate number of dwelling units to the state.

According to Naik, a total of 6,56, 945 Central government sanctioned houses have returned between 2016-2024.

While responding to a question from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator Manas Dutta, the minister said the sanctioned houses returned as the previous BJD government didn’t provide the list of the eligible beneficiaries.

“The Union government has so far granted a total of 42, 18, 364 houses to Odisha. As many as 36, 57, 847 houses have been completed from 2014 till date,” said the minister.

“While 5,27,604 houses are under construction, construction of  32, 913 granted houses has not started yet. As many as 1,26, 719 families have applied for the houses,” added Naik.

The minister’s reply comes as complete negation to the erstwhile BJD government’s accusation that the Centre was not forthcoming in sanctioning the required number of housing units to the state for political reasons.

On the other hand, the BJP would maintain that the BJD government was deliberately not identifying the beneficiaries as it feared that the latter would develop weakness for the saffron party.

“The previous BJD government headed by Naveen Patnaik was meting out discriminatory behavior to the poor. They were distributing Pradhan Mantri Awas (PMAY) purely on political considerations. Those who were BJD supporters were granted PMAY houses.  Many ineligible persons have availed pucca houses while the claims of the illegible beneficiaries were ignored,” alleged BJP legislator Dutta.

Many poor people had previously complained that the agents of the BJD were demanding bribe money ranging from Rs 10,000 to Rs 25,000 to facilitate sanction of PMAY houses.

The Union rural development ministry had in fact conducted a probe into the irregularities into the PMAY houses and asked the Naveen Patnaik government to take actions against the senior officials like Block Development Officers (BDOs) involved in it. However, a few lower grade officials in the Pipili block were suspended which the BJP said was just “eyewash.”

Now, from the minister’s reply as well as Dutta’s observation, you must be in a position to infer that sometimes why one chooses to become an underperformer. Naveen Babu, as Dutta said, surely planned to play a ‘blame game’ over the housing issue hoping that it would perhaps fetch him another term in power.