What flu? Not on my watch

BACKSTAGE

With bird flu sweeping through almost all but four districts of West Bengal, one cannot envy the situation that Surya Kanta Mishra, the high-profile health minister of West Bengal, is in.

He reportedly sent a letter (note the urgency!) to the central health ministry when the first news of the presence of bird flu in Birbhum district had come in and samples had been sent for tests to the specialised laboratories in Bhopal and Pune.

Even seven days later, a director of his department had told Business Standard that it was yet to be officially informed of the presence of bird flu in poultry in the state, though the state animal resources minister Anis Ur Rehman had already held a press conference to confirm from laboratory reports that the virus was present in the state.

So why did the minister act so late? There are no clear answers but only some indications in his own nature. Mishra is a doctor himself, a very senior CPI(M) leader from the Midnapur district and a dedicated party worker.

Opposition sources allege he was too busy getting thousands of his supporters to the Left Front mega rally in Kolkata on January 13 "" he was missing from the ministry "" to worry about mundane things like the flu.

As one senior bureaucrat, who shifted to the central cadre after many years of service in the state, says: "The problem is that the Left has been in power for too many years and the administrative machinery is now on its head thank to Left leaders."

Without naming Mishra, he explains, "I was told by my minister when I joined a department as its head that he had been holding the portfolio for many years and he had seen many bureaucrats come and go, so it was he who represented continuity in the government, not the secretary. This is an inversion of the constitutional machinery in which the administrative service is the thread of continuity in government decision-making and governance."

Opposition sources confirm that Mishra is a man cast in this mould "" he, as a rural leader, knows best what works in Bengal's villages, more than the city-bred overwhelmingly non-Bengali bureaucracy, and he has seen too much of life to succumb to panic when bird flu is only "suspected". Only this time, he has landed in a problem that will require all the help he can get before it can be resolved.

Mishra has been in hot water before "" ironically, he was brought in to clean the mess in the state's health department which had been rocked by scandals relating to wrong treatment, callousness and appalling neglect over the years under his predecessors.

His early years were traumatic because the Augean stables that the department was needed more than the cosmetic treatment that Mishra was doling out. This was so, say his critics, because he was too busy as a fellow doctor and CPI(M) warrior to rock his fellow medicos who were also overwhelmingly Leftist.

Yet he has revealed capacity for firm action "" when the last bird flu scare swept the country, there were reports of an Indian sailor sick with the flu on a ship in the Kolkata docks. He had come in on a vessel from an infected south-east Asian port city.

Mishra sent his departmental secretary Asim Barman, along with the city police and health specialists to the vessel, and the team seized the reluctant patient and shifted him under quarantine to the dedicated infectious diseases hospital in Kolkata.

This time around, though, much of Mishra's woes are of his own doing "" and the egg is clearly on his face.