Madikeri: During a meeting with the victims of natural calamities held in Madikeri, district in-charge minister Sa Ra Mahesh sent the representatives of TV channels out of the venue after expressing his unhappiness with them. The Kodagu District Journalists Association condemned this act.
The meeting was held on Friday, June 7 evening with last year’s natural calamity victims in the Kote old Vidhanasabhangana. As the meeting began, the victims from the different villages began expressing their disappointment with the improper distribution of the compensation due to them.
District MLAs K G Bopaiah, M P Appachu Ranjan and M P Sunil Subramani also condemned the neglect of the officers in disbursing compensations.
These developments were being recorded by the various television news channels and this did not sit well with minister S R Mahesh. He immediately asked all the channel representatives to leave the premises and come in only after he calls them.
The perplexed representatives objected the move.
The angry minister, however, did not stop at sending them out. He also expressed his disappointment in them and said, “The channels aired an incident of cutting the trees the whole day. Was that incident such a big issue to be aired the whole day?”
Even after the meeting, the minister justified his move of sending the news channel representatives out saying, “They would have made some other story about the meeting so, I sent them out.”
