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SAD demands restart of Post Matric Scholarship Scheme from this year

Chandigarh, November 1, 2020 (Yes Punjab News)
The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) today said chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh was trying to play out a farce with Dalit students by announcing re-launching of the SC scholarship scheme in the election year in 2021-22 even as he refused to release one penny from the Rs 2,440 crore budgetary provisions made for the SC scholarship scheme in the last three years. It demanded the scheme be restarted from the current academic session and all fee backlogs due to SC students should be paid to them immediately.

Terming the post matric scholarship scheme launched yesterday by the chief minister as a new ‘jumla’, former chief parliamentary secretary Pawan Kumar Tinu said it had been done as a cover up exercise to divert attention from the Rs 64 crore SC scholarship scam engineered by SC Welfare minister Sadhu Singh Dharamsot.

Asking the chief minister how he could launch a scheme for the next year after failing to provide any budgetary allocation for the same for three years running, Mr Tinu said a budget provision of Rs 620 crore was kept for the scheme in 2018-19, Rs 860 crore in 2019-20 and Rs 960 crore in 2020-21. “However not a single rupee was released to SC students which destroyed the future of four lakh students.

Now the government is trying to befool the SC community by announcing it will provide post matric scholarship from the next academic year. This is akin to committing a sin against the poor and the oppressed. The Dalits of Punjab will never forgive the Congress and chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh for inflicting this cruel joke on them”, Mr Tinu averred.

Mr Tinu said this was not all. “The chief minister has announced the post matric scholarship scheme from the next financial year and has claimed that private educational institutions will bear 40 per cent of the cost of the scheme. These institutions have already announced they will not do so. It means they were not even consulted before making the announcement. It shows how serious the government is towards the Dalit community”.

The SAD leader also asked the chief minister to tell Dalit students why Rs 309 crore which was sent for their welfare by the centre nine months back had not been distributed to them. He said even as the Punjab government misappropriated money sent for the welfare of Dalit students and did not release money for the same, other State governments including Rajasthan, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh had provided budgetary support to the scheme from State funds.

Holding the Congress government squarely responsible for reduction in the Dalit student intake by as much as two lakhs, Mr Tinu said those who had completed their studies were also suffering. He said as many as 10,000 degrees of Dalit students had been withheld by the Guru Nanak Dev University because their scholarship fee had not been deposited to institutions by the Punjab government.

Asking the chief minister to be responsive towards the issue of Dalits, Mr Tinu asked him to restart the SC scholarship scheme from the current academic session itself and pay backlog due to Dalits. He also demanded that SC Welfare minister Sadhu Singh Dharamsot, who was responsible for the SC scholarship scam, should be sacked, arrested and jailed for his crimes against SC students to send a clear cut message that such acts would not be tolerated.

Yes Punjab Online Since 2012


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