Modi's the Man

This snippet is straight from Rediff.com

I feel Narendra Modi is the best CM India has ever produced.Period.

from rediff.com 07/05/2005

The annual meetings of the National Development Council have become a familiar ritual.

Participants from the prime minister down to state chief ministers make set-piece speeches while officials work behind the scenes on consensus resolutions.

After two or three days of talkathons, they disperse happily, only to meet again for an equally fruitless exercise a year later.

Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh tried to break the mould this year, in vain.

To make the NDC deliberations more meaningful and to ensure a better understanding of problems confronting each state, he repeatedly asked the chief ministers not to read mechanically from their prepared speeches.

Since these had already been distributed along with various other agenda and background papers in a neat little folder at the start of the inaugural session on June 27 morning, these should be taken as read, the prime minister said.

Most chief ministers found it hard to speak extempore about the problems confronting their states and how the Centre could help solve them.

In fact, Dr Singh stopped a couple of chief ministers mid-sentence when they read out like parrots from the texts, but to no avail.

When Karnataka Chief Minister Dharam Singh was droning on and on -- hardly taking his eyes off the prepared text -- the prime minister politely asked him, 'Dharam Singhji, we have read your speech already. Please do not read it. If you have anything to add or amplify…' Before he could finish, Dharam Singh responded, 'Sir, I will not take long,' and went back to reading from the paper.

Several chief ministers, including Mulayam Singh Yadav from Uttar Pradesh, were caught on camera stealing the proverbial forty winks when they were supposed to be debating ways and means to boost economic growth in their states.

The one who stole the show was Narendra Modi. He made a power-point presentation without for a moment looking at the prepared text.

The Gujarat chief minister pointedly told the prime minister that though the Planning Commission was scaling down the growth target from over 8 per cent to a little over 7 per cent, Gujarat had registered a growth rate of over 15 per cent last year and was on course to repeat the feat this year too.

It wasn't just Modi's figures and statistics that impressed the chief ministers and senior babus at the NDC meet. Modi packaged his contents in a well-reasoned speech interspersed with pointed references to rising social and economic indicators made possible by policy measures undertaken by his government.

And because he had mastered his case well, there was not a soul in the main hall in Vigyan Bhawan who did not sit up and listen attentively to what he had to say.

At the end of his contribution, most chief ministers, including those belonging to the Congress, made it a point to congratulate Modi.

At the end of the first day, there was consensus among the participants that Modi's was by far the best.

West Bengal's Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and his Marxist counterpart from Tripura, Manik Sarkar, came distant second and third in a straw poll among the participants