Chandigarh: The Punjab assembly on Tuesday passed a resolution opposing the Centre’s G RAM G (Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission Gramin) law replacing Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
(MGNREGA) following prolonged heated exchanges between ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) members and opposition in a special session.
Rural development and panchayats minister Tarunpreet Sond who moved the resolution said that the new scheme takes away the right to guaranteed wages/employment from poor labourers, women and lakhs of job card–holding families of the state and imposes an additional financial burden on the states. Several other AAP leaders who spoke on the issue decried the new law.
EVENT SANS CONTENT, PURPOSE: WARRING
Meanwhile, state Congress president Amarinder Singh Raja Warring said the AAP leaders were rightly praising the MGNREGA and defending it, but none of them showed enough grace to mention Dr Manmohan Singh as the architect of MGNREGA.
Warring further said that Tuesday’s special session of the Vidhan Sabha was like any other “event” that the AAP is known to organise. “What is the takeaway from the session?” he asked, while pointing out, it was just an event without any content or purpose.
MEDIA STUNT: SAD
Meanwhile, the Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Badal said that the AAP government is running an event management company, not a real government. Today’s session is a pure media stunt and like other sessions will not result in any concrete benefit to Punjabis.`` The AAP government has convened multiple special sessions but has done ZERO follow-up on the resolutions passed including those on BBMB, RDF, drugs and flood relief and rehabilitation’’, he further alleged.
BID TO COVER UP ITS FAILURES: BJP
Meanwhile, the state BJP president Sunil Jakhar said that the session was an attempt to create bitterness in relations between the Centre and the state for its own political interests.
He said that, in reality, the AAP is indulging in such propaganda to cover up its failures.
