Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav’s largesse in giving awards and pension has come under his successor Yogi Adityanath’s scanner.
During its five-year rule (2012-2017), the Akhilesh government had rather liberally conferred Yash Bharti awards without any set criteria. Several individuals, who were merely close to the ruling dispensation or its top leaders, benefited under this generosity.
People here still remember how the female emcee of the Yash Bharti awards ceremony in Lucknow was spontaneously presented with the award, while she was calling out the names, which had been previously announced. A chit from Akhilesh was sent to her and she announced her name as well, much to the amusement of the battery of media persons and guests present on the occasion.
Currently, there are about 250 people who are being given this pension, including Bollywood personalities like Raj Babbar, Abhijit Bhattacharya, Sameer, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Kailash Kher, Muzaffar Ali, Sudhir Mishra, Raju Srivastava, Anurag Kashyap and Vishal Bhardwaj. Cricketers Mohd Kaif and Suresh Raina have also received the honour.
On April 20, 2017, during the culture department review and presentation before Adityanath, the chief minister had directed for a thorough scrutiny of the Yash Bharti awards. Since the pension is also related to the award, the culture department is in a fix over the pension payouts due from March 2017.
An amount of Rs 4.16 crore had been provisioned for the pension in the interim budget for five months (Apr-Aug 2017) of the current financial year 2017-18.
Now, the UP culture department director Anuradha Goel has written to the state government seeking instructions over these pensions.
In her letter dated April 25, addressed to the culture department undersecretary, Goel has referred to the chief minister’s directives with regard to the Yash Bharti awards and sought instructions for the future course of action.
Earlier, Lucknow-based RTI activist Nutan Thakur had also written to Adityanath about “the way rich and influential people are being given this pension” and had requested him to immediately stop pension to such persons.
She lamented that while the deserving and the extremely poor were getting paltry sums by way of widow and old age pensions, well-off personalities were being given Rs 50,000 per month as Yash Bharti pension, which was an insult to the poor.