Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said: “Remember how much problems one faced to get a gas cylinder? One had to go to MPs for a letter. Many MPs sold coupons in black. It was not acceptable to me that women of India should suffer due to lack of cooking gas facilities.” (Source: ANI)
Taking a dig at the previous Congress regime in Rajasthan headed by chief minister Ashok Gehlot, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said drought and Congress travel hand-in-hand in the state, wherever Congress goes twin brother drought follows. Addressing a function in Rajasthan’s Barmer, where the Prime Minister arrived today to inaugurate the commencement of workon the Rs 43,129 crore Baremer oil refinery project at Pachpadra, he said, “Congress aur aakaal (drought) judwa bhai hain, jahan Congress jayegi wahan aakaal jayega (Congress and drought are twin brothers, they travel together).”
In a scathing attack on the Congress, PM Modi said the party has “hoodwinked” people by just laying foundation stones for projects and has done nothing for the poor. He also touched upon the ongoing tug-of-war between the ruling BJP and Congress over taking credit for the refinery when he said the Congress had only laid foundation stones for projects across the country to claim credit. Over the slugfest, the Congress had last week slammed the state government for re-laying of the foundation stone, saying it had already been performed four years ago by Sonia Gandhi.
He further said that for the Congress ‘Garibi Hatao’ was an attractive slogan. “They nationalised the banks but the doors of the banks never opened for the poor. Jan Dhan Yojana changed this and the poor got access to banking facilities,” said PM Modi.
Modi tried to corner the Congress again on the issue of One Rank One Pension when he alleged that after seeing his commitment to the OROP scheme, the Congress provided for Rs 500 crore in the interim budget just before the 2014 general elections to claim credit. “Barmer refinery was at least on papers, OROP wasn’t even on paper,” he said, adding that no ground work on the beneficiaries or on the outgo was ever done. It took one-and-half-years to collate the list of beneficiaries of OROP and the implementation cost Rs 12,000 crore as against Rs 500 crore provided by the Congress, he said.
He said while the Congress just gave the slogan of ‘garibi hatao’ (remove poverty), the BJP government has worked towards doing so by way of providing free cooking gas (LPG) connection to poor women and giving free power connection to the four crore households that still do not have electricity.