Three days and it’s clear who is in charge — from a village to a university campus.

Noida Development Authority Chairman Rakesh Bahadur promptly out of the way, over 200 workers were today pressed into service to restart work on Chief Minister Mayawati’s pet project — the Gautam Buddha University in Greater Noida. The campus was to be completed by July 2004 but work stopped in August 2003, days after Mulayam Singh Yadav took charge in Luckow.

Now days after his exit, the 511-acre campus is getting a thorough mowing and statues of Gautam Buddha and Bhim Rao Ambedkar a fresh coat of paint. The area is also being electrified, with a new transformer already in place.

The renovation comes with a quick act of reprobation — an FIR filed with the Noida police on Sunday lists goods worth Rs 1.5 crore that are said to have been stolen from the campus over three years of neglect. “That includes boundary grills, drainage pipes, gates and tiles,” a police official told The Indian Express.

Not far from the proposed university by the proposed Taj Expressway, the story at Mayawati’s ancestral village Badalpur is even brighter.

Bulbs are glowing and fans are humming all hours of the day and night. But 24x3 — four days to go for a 24x7 — electricity is not the only thing that has changed in this village of 3,000 people, about a tenth of them Dalits. Officials in their Ambassadors have made a beeline for the village with lists of things that they have to do here.

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