Rahul Gandhi said even five paise of a rupee spent by the Centre is not reaching the intended beneficiaries as he launched a fresh attack on the Mayawati government.
LUCKNOW: At a public meeting in Jhansi, the hub of UP’s drought-hit Bundelkhand region, Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi lambasted the state government, squarely blaming it for poor drought-relief work and numerous starvation deaths.
“There have been more than 200 deaths due to starvation in Bundelkhand in the past eight months,” he said, making a direct reference to Mayawati’s eight-month-old government. “The state government and the bureaucracy are not doing their job,” he asserted.
“My father used to say that out of each rupee sent out by the Central government (as development funds), only 15 paise reaches the common man.
But here it seems that not even five paise is reaching the people of Bundelkhand,” Rahul said, drawing a round of applause at the Congress Party’s “Sookha raahat evam vikas” (drought relief and development) rally on Thursday.
“The people of Bundelkhand are not getting the benefits of any of the Central schemes,” he said adding that the performance of the seven Bundelkhand districts with regard to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREG) was “extremely poor”.
He said: “I have come across instances in which as many as 50 job cards have been issued with the same number… hardly any entries are there in any of the job cards I have seen.”
The importance the party high command attaches to the Bundelkhand region was amply clear from the top brass which formed the entourage of the Congress’s uncrowned prince.
The list included Central ministers Sri Prakash Jaiswal and Akhilesh Das, party general secretaries Mohsina Kidwai and Digvijay Singh, a host of senior party leaders, including Salman Khursheed and Sanjay Singh, besides state Congress president Rita Bahuguna Joshi.
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