Former Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda (File)Former Haryana Chief Minister, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, on Friday, fired a fresh salvo at the state government, alleging that the “BJP-JJP government was working on a dangerous policy of closing government schools and opening dens of intoxication in every village”.
The Haryana government had recently decided to merge 105 government schools that had a smaller number of students with other other government schools available within a radius of three kilometres. The state’s education minister Kanwar Pal Gurjar had while announcing the move stated that the erstwhile Bhupinder Singh Hooda-led Congress government had closed 124 primary schools in 2011 and 385 primary schools in 2014.
“The aim of this government is to promote intoxication, instead of education,” alleged Hooda in a statement on Friday, adding that the “speed with which the empire of intoxication is spreading in the state, it is clear that the government has completely failed to stop it”.
The Leader of Opposition, in his statement, further said, “Not only this, the state’s lax attitude towards increasing drug addiction shows that the business of intoxicants is protected by the government. Due to this, illegal drugs have spread to villages. This drug addiction is continuously ruining the present and future of the youths of the state.”
Hooda added, “The government is now conducting a survey to open drug de-addiction centres across the state whereas the first task should have been to curb this black empire by taking strict action against drug dealers”.
Citing statistics, the former CM claimed that in Sirsa district alone, 43 people have died due to drug overdose within a year. “Haryana has surpassed Punjab and Himachal in the number of cases of suicides due to drugs. Within a year, 89 people have died by suicide due to drugs. Apart from this, there are reports of youths dying while taking drug injections from Sirsa and different districts,” he said.
Hooda said that youths from the state were facing the maximum unemployment in the country. “Due to this desperation, they get caught in the grip of drugs and crime. If we look at the NCRB data, we can see that Haryana has overtaken some big states in terms of crime rate. According to the NCRB report, there were 1,144 murders in the year 2021 in the state. That is, 3 to 4 people are killed every day in the state on an average. Haryana ranks second in the entire country with a murder rate of 3.8 daily,” he said.