Phillaur MLA Vikramjit Singh Chaudhary said on Friday that the Aam Aadmi Party government was re-releasing the same grant for the establishment of Guru Ravidass Bani Adhyayan Centre at Dera Sachkhand Ballan, which was given by the previous Congress party government.
Addressing a press conference at the Press Club in the city accompanied by Jalandhar District Congress (Urban) President Rajinder Beri, former Kartarpur MLA Chaudhary Surinder Singh and Nakodar constituency in charge Dr Navjot Dahiya, he showed government notifications and correspondence about the grant and said the last government had announced a grant of Rs 50 crore for establishing a state-of-the-art Guru Ravidass Bani Adhyayan Centre at Dera Sachkhand Ballan and had released a cheque for Rs 25 crore in the first installment, but in an attempt to take undue credit after coming to power, the AAP government first stopped its release and then performed the charade of sanctioning the same amount for the same project to claim all the credit.
Taking the reporters through the timeline of sanctioning and releasing the amount for Dera Sachkhand Ballan by the Congress government, MLA Chaudhary stated that after the announcement of the grant, the government had constituted a 10-member Guru Ravidass Bani Adhyayan Centre Committee under the chairmanship of Sant Niranjan Dass Ji Maharaj on December 28, 2021.
Three days later, on December 31, 2021, the Planning Department released Rs 25 crore to Jalandhar Deputy Commissioner under state level initiative Punjab Nirman Programme. Since only those registered societies and charitable trusts which had been registered at least three years before were eligible for grant under this programme and the maximum grant-in-aid allowed on a one-time basis was only Rs 10 lakhs, a special sanction was necessary from the Punjab Cabinet of Ministers. On January 5, 2022, the cabinet gave its approval.
However, three months later, MLA Chaudhary said, on March 30, 2022, the newly elected Aam Aadmi Party government recalled the grant and ordered that the amount be given back to the government by the next day, that is, March 31, 2022 along with interest accrued.
Now, he said, the same grant for the same project was being re-released by CM Bhagwant Mann and AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal almost after one year. He said if there were no by-election in Jalandhar, the AAP leaders would not have cared about even visiting Dera Sachkhand Ballan, let alone giving a grant to the dera.
MLA Chaudhary said even if the AAP government wanted to re-release the grant sanctioned by Congress government after a year, the least they could do was to give a cheque of full amount of Rs 50 crore.
He said the focus of the government was only on claiming fake credit as shown by its spending of lakhs of rupees of taxpayers’ money to put up hoardings all over Jalandhar city, adding that it was not the government of the ‘Aam Aadmi’ as it claimed, but the government of ‘Ad Aadmi’, whose sole focus was only on propping up themselves on the basis of advertisements.