PIONEER NEWS SERVICE | Dehradun
Terming the three-year term of Pushkar Singh Dhami so far during his second tenure as chief minister as a failure on all fronts, senior leaders of Uttarakhand Congress said that the people of the State are continuing to suffer under the BJP regime. The Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president Karan Mahara, former chief minister Harish Rawat, leader of opposition in Vidhan Sabha Yashpal Arya and former PCC president Pritam Singh jointly addressed the media at Congress Bhawan here on Saturday.
Rawat said that the BJP government has no roadmap for the development of the State. He said that the roads which are the reflection of development of the State are in a pathetic condition. Rawat said that the number of black spots (danger points) on the roads of the State have tripled in the last eight years. “Today, a huge imbalance is visible in development. There is a huge difference between budget provision and budget expenditure,’’ he said.
The PCC president said that women are not safe under BJP rule in Uttarakhand. He said that the data of National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) shows that among the nine Himalayan States, the crime against women is highest in Uttarakhand. He said that people of the BJP organisation are involved in the crime against women. He said that in the latest incident, police and administration misbehaved with women in Rudrapur village of Rudraprayag when they protested the PTCUL’s construction work on their common grazing land. Mahara further said that more than 60,000 posts in different departments of the State government are vacant. The government is not regularising 40,000 UPNL employees even after the order of the court.
The PCC president said that there is a long list of scams of the Dhami government such as paper leak cases and scams that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, which have been pushed under the carpet. Mahara said that the issue of land law and domicile are interlinked and the government has made such a land law which challenges domicile.
The LoP said that the debt burden in the State has increased to Rs 95,000 crore. He said that the different departments of government have failed to utilise the allotted budget. Arya said that a sum of Rs 259 crore was allotted for disaster management in 2024-25 but only 30 per cent of this was utilised. He said that only 8.25 per cent of the allotted budget under the social welfare head was utilised. Arya said that the BJP government had promised to double the income of farmers but that promise remained only in papers.
Former PCC president Pritam Singh said the government talks about zero tolerance against corruption, but its own ministers are involved in corruption.
