Even as Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi on Saturday was exhorting the IT sector to lead the country towards progress and his media managers putting brains together for the much-hyped rally here on Sunday, a fast one was being pulled on him.
And that too in Bangalore itself — a multi-purpose cargo berth and a barge jetty of the Kandla Port Trust (which is located in the Gulf of Kutch) were remotely inaugurated by Union minister for shipping GK Vasan at a function in the city.
The ostensible reason was that the Union minister was already scheduled to attend the meeting of the Maritime States Development Council (MSDC) being held in the city. Vasan dedicated to the nation the two projects that started commercial operations on Saturday itself. These two projects are meant to help Kandla maintain its position as a port of prominence among its rivals.
This event took place in Bangalore, even as Modi was inaugurating as 10,000-seat campus of a leading IT services, consulting and business solutions firm in Gandhinagar. "Information technology should be used to its maximum potential and common man should be empowered by using technological interventions," Modi said there.
Back in the IT City, however, the inauguration did not pass off smoothly. In fact, it was a disaster of sorts. The remote itself did not work here, and "click on the laptop" that would have inaugurated the facilities in faraway Kandla did not carry through either. In the end, the curtains had to be parted manually, and an announcement had to suffice.
Maybe, remotely inaugurating facilities at a port from a city which is hundreds of kilometres from the nearest coastline, does not really work.
