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Published Oct 22, 2024 | 1:25 PM ⚊ Updated Oct 22, 2024 | 1:25 PM
Cheonggyecheon is a 10.9-kilometre-long stream and public space in downtown Seoul. (Creative Commons)
A study tour is a euphemism for a junket. We know of such ‘studies’ organised often by the corporate world for journalists.
They constitute long periods of leisure and entertainment, punctuated by brief spells of work. Governments, too, sponsor journalists on such trips, but they hit a roadblock during the BRS rule in Telangana.
After a decade, overseas study trips for journalists — ostensibly to study development schemes — seemed to have resumed under the A Revanth Reddy dispensation.
A contingent of media persons accompanied a delegation of Congress ministers in an unquenchable quest for wisdom in the South Korean capital, Seoul. The delegation is expected to study how Cheonggyecheon, a stream in downtown Seoul, has transformed the urban landscape.
The team is being led by ministers Ponguleti Srinivasa Reddy, Ponnam Prabhakar, MP Chamala Kiran Kumar Reddy, and officials.
The Revanth Reddy sarkar has sent them to study how transformation of the river, once a drain, into one that had turned into a beautiful stream, augmenting the appeal of the city.
But the actual intention of the visit is as clear as daylight. The chief minister wanted the media to support his endeavour to turn Musi into an economic and tourism hub! And sending scribes — the watchdogs of democracy — on a mission to study a Korean river seems apt with criticism mounting back home.
When N Chandrababu Naidu was the chief minister of the undivided Andhra Pradesh, he sent a large contingent of journalists to accompany a team of MLAs on a tour of five Southeast Asian nations – China, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, and Singapore.
The more than a week-long tour was meant to equip journalists with information on reforms that catalyzed the growth and well-being of the people. That it turned out to be a junket was evidenced by what one MLA did.
After touching down in Bangkok and checking into the hotel, he came out on his own and had a massage in a Thai parlour which he had been dying to have all his life.
A reporter from the journalist contingent followed him surreptitiously to the massage parlour and promptly filed a report, which became the talk in Hyderabad the next day.
Then again, Naidu, as the chief minister of truncated Andhra Pradesh, suggested to the Singapore government to sponsor a trip for journalists exclusively to study how it was implementing the Amaravati development plan.
The journalist contingent went around the city, interacted with various departments, and studied how the government had come up with the blueprint for Amaravati. As it was sponsored by the Singapore government, and as there were no MLAs or MPs, it was work, work all the way — with very little time for entertainment in the city-state.
Now, the delegation visiting Seoul is expected to return to Hyderabad with a broader perspective on the rejuvenation of rivers. The Opposition BRS has been taking the state government to cleaners for sponsoring the team which it considers a waste of time and money.
Only time will tell if the BRS is correct.
