The BJP MLA Munirathna on Monday sought to turn the tables on the Congress government, which has launched the ‘my tax my right’ campaign to seek appropriate share in Central funds and taxes.
Pointing out in the Assembly that Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his ministerial colleagues and the ruling Congress legislators staged a protest in Delhi recently seeking rightful share for Karnataka, which is the second highest contributor of taxes in the country, Mr. Munirathna referred to Bengaluru not getting its rightful share of funds for development in the State Budget despite accounting for 60% of Karnataka’s revenues.
“How can you follow different yardsticks by staging a protest in Delhi to seek rightful share of funds for the State and ignoring Bengaluru in the Budget presented by you,” he remarked.
“Let alone the rightful share, Bengaluru has not got even a decent allocation in the State Budget,” he alleged, while expressing concern that the City was choking due to infrastructure lacunae as its population had almost touched two crore.
Already, several IT & BT companies are shifting their base to Hyderabad as it is difficult to operate in Bengaluru owing to heavy traffic, he claimed. He alleged that major road widening works had not been taken up in Bengaluru after 2007-08.
The city was expected to house a population of 3.5 crore by 2050, he said, while alleging that instead of getting ready for infrastructure development with a futuristic vision, the State government was indulging in discrimination in terms of allocation of funds for constituency development in the city.
He alleged that the Congress members had been given huge funds while the BJP MLAs had got paltry amounts. Citing an example, he said the RR Nagar constituency represented by him had got only ₹38.09 crore for the duration of 2023-24 and 2024-25, while constituencies represented by the Congress MLAs had got more than ₹100 crore each.
