Modi urged to check authenticity of Mamata’s plea on central dues

Kolkata : Just 48 hours after West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the plea to initiate immediate release of the state’s dues for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) and PM Awas Yojana, the Leader of Opposition in West Bengal Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari has written a letter to the Prime Minister, requesting him to cross-check the authenticity of the Chief Minister’s claims on this count.

In the letter that Adhikari forwarded to the Prime Ministers’ Office (PMO) on Saturday, he has requested Narendra Modi to direct his officers to release funds only after ensuring that the funds are utilised maintaining transparency and protocol, so that funds allocated under a particular head is not spent under other heads.

Adhikari has highlighted alleged expenditure irregularities under those two schemes namely MGNREGS and PM Awas Yojana, for which Mamata Banerjee forwarded a letter to the Prime Minister on Thursday for immediate release of central funds.

In the letter, the Leader of Opposition pointed out that while in the letter, the Chief Minister admitted that 32 lakh houses have been constructed under the PM Awas Yojana scheme, in reality the state government was running the scheme under a different name — Bangla Awas Yojana. He requested that central funds under this housing scheme should not be released unless the state government runs the scheme with the name PM Awas Yojona.

In the letter, Adhikari also alleged that the MGNREGS scheme has become a source of illegal earning for the medium and lower level Trinamool Congress leaders. According to him, the job card holders under the MGNREGS scheme in West Bengal hardly get any benefit from the scheme.

To recall, in her letter to the Prime Minister on Thursday, the chief minister alleged that that wage payment under MGNREGS in West Bengal is pending for more than four months as the Union government has held back around Rs 6,500 crore, out of which Rs 3,000 core was on account of wage liabilities and around Rs 3,500 crore was on account of non-wage liabilities.