Chandigarh, February 20, 2020 (Yes Punjab News)
The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) legislative wing today held a protest outside the Vidhan Sabha along with people who have received severely inflated bills and demanded an immediate roll back of the power hike as well as an independent inquiry into the Rs 4300 crore power scam.
SAD legislators urged and even sent messages to chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh to allow few of the people who had received inflated bills, including a poor family who lives close to his Moti Bagh residence in Patiala, to meet him. However senior civil and police officials refused entry to the affected people whose connections have even been disconnected despite repeated pleas showing the insensitive and anti-people attitude of the Congress government.
Addressing the media, legislative party leader Sharanjit Singh Dhillon and former minister Bikram Singh Majithia said the Congress government should immediately reverse the power hike and provide power to domestic and industrial consumers at Rs five per unit as promised in the party’s election manifesto.
The leaders junked the chief minister’s announcement to bring out a white paper on the issue, saying this was an excuse to divert attention from the real problem. “People are not interested in white papers. They want power at Rs 5 per unit. You should provide the same at the earliest”.
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Mr Majithia also detailed how the Congress government had affected fifteen power hikes in the last three years taking per unit cost from Rs 5.25 per unit during SAD-BJP tenure to Rs 9 per unit now. He said the power sector was the most heavily taxed sector in Punjab.
The SAD leader also demanded an independent inquiry into the Rs 4300 crore power scam whereby the government deliberately lost cases before the Supreme Court and an Arbitration Tribunal to provide undue benefit to private thermal plants. He said the people wanted that the Power Minister under whose tenure such corruption had occurred should be dismissed and all those guilty of corruption should be booked.
Mr Majithia said the under privileged sections of society, including the scheduled caste and backward communities were the most burdened by the repeated power hikes along with the common man. He said during the SAD-BJP tenure both SC and BC communities were given 200 units free of cost.
He said while this facility had been snatched from the BC community during Congress rule, even the facility given to the SC community had been made infructious. He said it was because of this and the government’s policy to unload its inefficiencies and corruption on the common man that power tariff had been increased repeated.
