The Shinde-Fadnavis government on Thursday decided to reintroduce the pension to those who fought against the Emergency imposed and jailed between 1975 and 1977. The Maha Vikas Aghadi government in July 2020 had scrapped the decision taken by the BJP led government in 2018. This was announced by Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis in the presence of Chief Minister Eknath Shinde after the state cabinet meeting held at Mantralaya.
Fadnavis said nearly 3,600 who were jailed during the emergency benefited from the pension scheme and they will continue to get it with today’s decision. In addition, the government will soon clear another 800 applications pending for approval.
Under the scheme anyone who underwent imprisonment for less than a month or a month would get Rs 5,000 as pension and for anyone who had undergone three months of imprisonment would get Rs 10,000 as pension. The scheme was officially started by the Fadnavis government on January 3, 2019.
The MVA government announced that it had decided to stop giving pensions saying that it was due to the delicate financial condition of the government due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Several Congress Ministers like Nitin Raut were vocal in advocating scrapping of the pension. He had raised it in earlier cabinet meetings. Raut had claimed that the pensions were being used to ‘reward’ RSS functionaries by the erstwhile BJP-Sena government.
However, Fadnavis claimed that the MVA government could have suspended the decision as the Congress was the ruling partner.
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