Whether it is a dazzling day when the River Ganga is glowing golden or a rainy one when it shines silver, there is one person who will, at one point of the day, cross the Second Hoogly Bridge over the flowing waters to reach her office Nabanna, the state Secretariat and that is West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee.

But as the Parliamentary elections draw near, we must focus away just from the river and see how Didi, as Banerjee is affectionately called, has been working in the jungles and the hills of her state too. And this is that story. “I will vote for Didi,” giggled a little girl in a village in Jangalmahal, “because she gives us rice.” I was on a reporting trip to the remote districts near the Bengal and Jharkhand border before the general elections.

Though she was clearly too young to exercise her franchise, her spontaneous outburst of appreciation was no doubt a revelation as to the extent to which West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s public distribution schemes for the poor people of the state have positively impacted their lives. From free food to subsidised education and healthcare, she has flushed the districts and towns with the goods.

And interview after interview with the “grassroots” people of the state in the run up to the Parliamentary elections next year shows how Didi has done her homework about what the people of the land need and in the past decade that she has been in power she has proceeded to provide them that.

So much so that, says a section of her supporters, she can easily rest on her laurels and let her work do the talking during elections except that she will not do that. “Mamata Banerjee works twenty-four seven and this is not just speaking metaphorically but literally too,” says Professor Om Prakash Mishra, former Trinamul Core Committee member who knows the unrelenting schedule that Didi follows. “Other than a few hours of the day when she has to rest she is perpetually doing something.”

Which is why when much ado had been made about Didi’s return to the Secretariat yesterday after a hiatus of around fifty days, it was seen as misplaced hullabaloo. “See, Mamata Banerjee’s role as chief minister is to govern and guide and she has been doing that impeccably from her office and it is irrelevant whether it is from her home office or the Secretariat,” points out Dr. Mishra.

“Because of a practical impediment which was an injury she sustained to her knee and because doctors advised her rest, that she did not go out. But she conducted all the business that required to be done and left nothing undone. In fact, as an academic and researcher myself who is familiar with intense work schedules I am simply amazed by Mamata’s ability to work tirelessly.”

A former bureaucrat who had worked with the West Bengal chief minister said about Mamata: “I have never witnessed that kind of energy as far as work is concerned. She is not just a perfectionist herself but she expects others to be meticulous too.”