CHANDIGARH: Punjab’s leader of opposition (LoP) Partap Singh Bajwa of the Congress claimed on Saturday that the state government’s scheme of home delivering wheat flour (atta) to the beneficiaries was "ill-conceived" and floated in haste for political mileage on the advice of big corporate houses, "which will only lead to corruption".
Bajwa alleged that: "In the guise of this scheme, the AAP government wants to please the corporate houses and render more than 17,000 ration depot holders jobless.” Bajwa questioned the need for pumping in more than Rs 500 crore into just distributing the wheat flour when the process was well taken care of by the ration depots. “It seems that some private players close to the government are eager to make a quick buck out of this scheme," he said.
On Friday, a Punjab and Haryana high court division bench led by chief justice Ravi Shankar Jha had restrained the government from going ahead till October 17. Hailing the high court’s intervention of as "timely", Bajwa said: "I fail to understand the logic of home delivering the flour when the beneficiaries were getting it already from the fair-price shops. Was there a public outcry or a demand? This is just another publicity stunt, and welfare of the poor is not its objective."
Bajwa said the poor beneficiaries of Punjab were getting their provisions because those 17,000-odd fair price shops were serving them.
"So what has changed now? They will go redundant and their families will suffer", he said.
On why he thought the scheme was ill-conceived, he said: "The moist and humid weather is bound to infest this 'atta' with weevils, pantry beetles, and flour bugs, rendering it also unfit for human consumption".
Bajwa accused chief minister Bhagwant Mann of failing to sustain the "Sadi Rasoi" of the previous Congress government.
