OSA Constitution Draft June 06, 2013

 

Date: June 11, 2013

 

Dear Members:

 

By now, you are no doubt aware that in the course of the last year, we have worked with our Legal Advisor to revise our existing Constitution & Bylaws. In accordance with certain changes in the revision, our Legal Advisor has also revised our “Membership Form/Application” and created a “Statement of Member Rights”, with terms and conditions of membership intended to apply to all current and future members.

This project was a continuation of the 2011 redraft of the OSA Constitution. Although we ratified a new constitution in 2011, it was the intention of the 2009-11 and 2011-13 Executive Committees that we would obtain legal counsel to finalize the draft in the course of the next two years. A portion of our operating budget had, in fact, been set aside for this purpose. We are happy to report, however, that our in-house Legal Advisor has completed the revision for us and we have not had to spend OSA funds on outside legal counsel for this task.

As you may recall, we circulated drafts of the Constitution & Bylaws, Membership Application, and Statement of Member Rights (previously referred to as a “Membership Agreement”) on April 12^th. Subsequently, we posted an open invitation on OSANet to join a “Constitution Review Committee” for purposes of reviewing the 2013 drafts of these documents. The members of the Constitution Review Committee devoted countless hours toward this project, and we are very appreciative of their efforts. These members were: Sanjiv Behera, Barnali Dasverma, Biswajit Khandai, Amiya Nayak, Nick Patnaik, Deva Pattanayak, Esha Bandyopadhyay (as the Legal Advisor), and Sushant Satpathy (as a representative of the Executive Committee and Board of Governors). Upon completion of the Committee’s review, the Board of Governors voted upon the changes proposed by the Committee. Those decisions are reflected in the drafts that were posted on OSANet on June 5th, 2013.

The 2013 drafts of these documents will be presented to you, the members of OSA, for approval and ratification on July 6th, 2013, at the Annual Convention. During this 30-day period, we welcome your comments and suggestions. Should you have any feedback, we request that you send them via e-mail to osaexec@orissasociety.org which will be distributed to all OSA officials.

You will notice that the revised Constitution & Bylaws have a look and feel that may appear different from the prior version. In order to assist you in your review, we have prepared the attached list of substantive changes that we believe to be worthy of note. Within the list, we have tried to provide explanation as to how those changes originated and evolved. We hope that you will find the attached document helpful. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and, with your support, ratifying a revised Constitution in July.

 

Kind regards,

 

Annapurna Pandey

Kuku Das

Leena Mishra

Sushant Satpathy