Baghel best-performing CM, Chandrasekhar Rao worst: Survey

A governance survey by IANS has ranked Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel on the top of the list of best-performing chief ministers in India.

According to the IANS-CVoter Governance Index, just a six per cent of respondents, whose answers were recorded during a survey, expressed anger against Baghel and demanded a regime change, while a majority of the respondents wanted him to continue as chief minister.

A majority of 44.7 per cent of people were angry with the Centre and only 36.6 per cent were found upset with the Baghel government.

The IANS report credits Baghel’s popularity to the welfare projects launched by him including free education for children in private schools and the initiative to bear the expenses of children who lost parents/guardians to COVID under the Mahtari Dular Yojana.

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 Also the NITI Aayog’s SDG India Index report 2020-21 named Chhattisgarh as the top-performing state in India on the gender equality parameter (among 114 other indicators) of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The report on the quarterly survey on chief ministers was published after taking the answers of 30,000 cities across all the 543 Lok Sabha seats and has a margin error of +/-3 per cent at the national level and +/-5 per cent at the state level.

Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami is the least-hated chief minister after Baghel, followed by Odisha’s Naveen Patnaik. Only 10.1 per cent of the electorate is displeased with Dhami while the rest want to give the newly-inducted chief minister the benefit of doubt. However, over 61 per cent of the respondents were angry with the Uttarakhand state government.

Similarly around 10.4 per cent of the electorate is against Naveen Patnaik and 37.6 per cent is angry with the state government.

“The CEO working style of CMs is popular. People are liking CMs with centralised decision making,” CVoter founder Yashwant Deshmukh told IANS.

“These are leaders who are not afraid of taking the blame. It is risky when things go wrong as in the case of former Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh. But there is a better rating for the CEO style. We are living in a Parliamentary democracy, but a Presidential system is becoming popular with the public,” he added.

Patnaik was adjudged the best performing chief minister followed by Delhi’s Arvind Kejriwal and Andhra Pradesh’s Jagan Mohan Reddy in the C Voter Survey in January this year. Former Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat, on the other hand, was named the least performing chief minister with only 0.41 per cent of people voting in his favour.

The CVoter Tracker, a daily opinion tracker, maps the opinion of over a hundred thousand randomly selected respondents in a calendar year. It is functional in 11 Indian languages.

The top among the most-hated chief ministers is Telangana Chief Minister Chandrasekhar Rao with whom 30.3 per cent of respondents are angry. Deshmukh said the time is rife for the BJP to make inroads into the state with the central government having good ratings against the state government’s score.

He says the most likely solution for KCR’s party to stay in power is to pass on the baton to his son KT Rama Rao.

While there is a collective anger quotient of 29.2 per cent against regimes in the northeastern states, around 28.1 per cent of Uttar Pradesh’s electorate is unhappy with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and the alleged polarisation politics of his government.

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However, the fact that 40 per cent of people are comfortable under Adityanath’s rule is a sign that the BJP is looking at a return to power.