Rabindra Kumar Mishra desired to enter the public services and held a BSc in Physics. He tried four times without success. Mishra has also worked for Vedanta since 2009 and holds a UGC-NET qualification. But in order to get ready for the UPSC, he willingly left his position in 2015.
A young man from Odisha who turned to activism after being rejected from the civil service claims to have sent more than 70,000 tweets, letters, and emails to help others with their problems. His actions have earned him the title of “grievance master.” Rabindra Kumar Mishra desired to enter the public services and held a BSc in Physics. He tried four times without success. Mishra has also worked for Vedanta since 2009 and holds a UGC-NET qualification. But in order to get ready for the UPSC, he willingly left his position in 2015.
Mishra asserts that thousands of issues he raised through social media, emails, and complaint websites over the course of the last two years, which were tarnished by the pandemic, have been resolved. Mishra talked about two such instances: the Malkangiri MGNREGA job scam and the Balasore district malnutrition problem. In all situations, the relevant authorities responded to the concerns and took appropriate action.
In the job fraud case, the block development officer’s early investigation revealed how intermediaries and the sarpanch employed schoolchildren to steal the money from rural jobs. A school boy named Sridhant Duruka was persuaded to carry out the MGNREGA task in this instance. Although he was only 14, his age was displayed as 18. He actually put in 34 days of labour for Rs 9,600. On paper, he was only listed as having worked for 104 days, while two middlemen pocketed the wages for the additional days.
“Duruka responded that he had never gone to Padmagiri’s UGB (Utkal Grameen Bank) to withdraw money. Instead, the conman had persuaded him to provide a thumbprint in a biometric device once in his town in order to retrieve the labour payment deposited to his account “said the report. Duruka had been escorted into Utkal Grameen Bank by a different con artist in order to retrieve the bank passbook, and while there, “he learned that a significant amount of money had been withdrawn from his account without his knowledge.” The block development officer suggested that a technical team or investigating agency at the district level conduct an investigation.
In a different instance, Mishra had complained in writing to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) about the starvation-like conditions in the Balasore district’s Nilagiri Block, where 50 tribal children were impacted. The commission acknowledged the complaint and asked the District Magistrate for a report.
The commission noted in July that the required report from the authority was still pending despite instruction in March and a reminder in May. If the report was not submitted by 23 August 2022, the commission took this seriously and issued a summons to the district magistrate, requesting his personal appearance.
The 33-year-old said in a statement to the media that his first cause was when he organised a social media campaign for further attempts for candidates associated with the EWS (Economically Weaker Sections). After finishing his tenure in the public service, Mishra relocated from Delhi to Odisha. And the pandemic started at that point. Mishra claimed that he began noticing on social media urgent calls by refugees as the health crisis put the nation into an unprecedented lockdown. He immediately began tweeting, tagging, and emailing information to authorities in order to assist them in any way he could. Even though I failed the civil services exam, Mishra stated, “I could not clear the civil services but I am using all the knowledge I gained during my preparations to get justice for the people on the margins”.
(Source: Agent)
Prasanta Patnaik