National

Metier Gauge

<i>Outlook</i> assesses our netas' performance in their home base

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Metier Gauge
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Can our leaders, who can barely complete an electoral sentence without uttering the G-word, blithely ignore it in their own constituency?

Outlook decided to see if our leaders walked the talk like they do on TV. We sent our reporters across the country to 20 constituencies of prominent leaders from 14 national parties. The brief was to assess the performance of each of these leaders—all MPs, all faces of their parties—in their own backyard, and feel the pulse of the people on their performance in the last five years.

Did they contribute to the overall health and economy of the area? Was sufficient attention paid to the concerns of the people? Did they use their funds well? How do their constituencies figure on key social indices: overall literacy rate, female literacy, electrified households, child mortality rate, incidents of violence and average household income?

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What we found was the eternal truth: there are good leaders and some not-so-good ones. Many do take the welfare of their constituencies seriously, but there are others who don’t, for varied reasons.

What we also realised is that our netas can no longer be apparitions that surface once every five years come election time, plead for our votes, make tall promises and then do the disappearing act.

They need to have followed their words with concrete action—or risk being outed.

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