By IANS,
Lucknow: In a quick retort to Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi’s remarks against her style of governance, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati Wednesday termed his forays into Dalit homes and villages as nothing more than a “big melodrama”.
Also vehemently refuting Gandhi’s charge made at a rally in Bahraich Wednesday that she had dismissed National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) as “useless”, Mayawati claimed that far from making any such observation, she had actually suggested certain fundamental alterations in the scheme with a view to making it more meaningful and permanent.
According to a ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) spokesman, “way back on Oct 9, 2007, the chief minister had sought to point out at a public rally in Lucknow that the NREGS, which entitles a landless labourer to 100 days of employment in a year, was not a permanent solution to the problem of unemployment.”
“The chief minister had further sought to clarify that if she were to form her government in Delhi, she would prefer to utilise the funds allocated towards NREGS to a more concrete programme that would insure permanent jobs to poor people,” he added.
He condemned the Congress leader’s “obvious intent to mislead and confuse the simple people of the state.”
In a rebuttal to Gandhi’s claim that he alone could actually relate to the common man in the villages of the state because he was ready to share the water they drank and the meals they ate, BSP spokesman Swami Prasad Maurya said: “Perhaps the Congress yuvraj (prince) has not cared to know that the chief minister has visited as many as 81 Ambedkar villages, 80 slums, 88 hospitals and community health centres, 148 tehsil headquarters and 148 police stations spread across the state’s 72 districts.”
“Besides getting a first hand account of the functioning in these places, she has also ordered prompt action against erring officials only with the intent of improving things wherever there was anything lacking,” he added.
He sought to know “whether the Congress party leaders ever cared to carry out inspections right down to the grassroots level during their 40 years of rule in UP?”
Blaming successive Congress governments since independence for lack of industrialisation and employment in the state, Maurya added: “Chief Minister Mayawati was addressing the problem at the roots by concentrating on augmentation of power generation without which industrialisation would remain a distant dream.”
According to him, “the efforts initiated by the Mayawati government would ensure an energy self-sufficient Uttar Pradesh by 2014 and a power surplus state by 2017.”