Chandigarh, September 16, 2019 (Yes Punjab News)
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Punjab unit president and Sangrur Member of Parliament (MP) Bhagwant Mann, while expressing his deep dismay and disillusionment over the non-payment of dues worth crores on account of payment of pre-post matric scholarship payable to the ‘dalit’ students under the scheme, said the erstwhile BJP-SAD and now the ruling Catain governments were squarely responsible for ruining careers of teeming millions of beneficiaries in the state.
He added that the poor and the ‘dalit’ were never on the agenda of these power-hungry politicians, who alleged, had always used the underprivileged strata as their vote bank and leverage it to translate into win elections, which reflected their anti-dalit stance.
In a statement issued from party headquarters in Chandigarh here on Monday, Mann said that he, day in and day out, got phone calls from the hundreds of harried students for help to release their certificates from their respective colleges, thereby enabling them to seek admission in the various colleges of their choice to pursue higher studies, saying that many of them had not been awarded the degrees from their schools and colleges.
Mann said that the anti-student move had not only left hundreds of government, non-government colleges and universities face extinction as the government had not released requisite funds for years running into more than 1000 crores of rupees to the respective colleges and universities, including Punjabi University and other govt-run universities and professional colleges.
The AAP MP said that while on the one hand, the government and non-schools in Delhi run under the Arvind-Kejriwal government had brought monumental changes in school education there, a promise it had given to the people of Delhi, on the other Captain Amarinder Singh Government, which claimed to have fulfilled as many as 141 poll promises, had failed to even provide adequate staff in various schools and colleges what to speak about releasing the pending pre/post matric scholarship dues or improving on education, thus rendering the hassled students and their parents to fend for themselves, Mann asserted.
Mann said that he would shortly meet Union HRD Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal in Delhi to discuss the issue of the payment of pending pre/post matric scholarship dues to bail out the beleaguered students, saying both the union and state governments were, instead of coming to the rescue of the students, indulging in a slugfest trading charges and counter charges against each for the Himalaya botch-up.
