Patna: RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav on Sunday accused BJP national president Nitin Nabin of lacking guts to tell Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah visit Bihar’s flood-hit and drought-hit areas.
Slamming BJP leaders, Tejashwi told newspersons that BJP national president was from Bihar but he lacked confidence to tell Modi and Shah to visit his state, suffering from both the flood and drought.
“Bihar has got its first BJP chief minister, eight union ministers from the state and 42 NDA MPs. There are also more than 250 MPs in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and MLAs and MLCs but all of them are ineffective and incompetent. People will hold such ineffective public representatives accountable,” he asserted.
He said the state had received less than 35 percent of expected rainfall. Due to the severe drought, standing crops across lakhs of hectares are being destroyed, while millions of farmers are unable to even recover their input costs, he added.
RJD leader claimed that the government had not yet assessed the drought situation, alleging that farmers were facing a livelihood crisis.
Around 45 lakh people in the state have been affected by the floods, but the NDA government is showing no concern for the flood victims, he alleged. He claimed a few community kitchens and relief camps were opened merely as a formality, but they were shut down within two to four days due to lack of funds.
He contended that disaster victims had the first right over Bihar's state treasury. He claimed that when the Mahagathbandhan government was in power in 2015 and 2022, with the RJD holding the disaster management and finance portfolios, a provision was made in the budget on the advice of RJD national president Lalu Prasad that four per cent of the state's total budget could be used as a contingency fund during floods, drought, natural disasters and other crises.
“Now calculate according to the budget how much Bihar's contingency fund should be. Where has that money gone? The contingency fund was withdrawn in June itself, and now there is a shortage of funds for flood victims,” he said.
He demanded that the “so-called double-engine government” immediately provide Rs 15,000 in assistance to every flood victim, conduct a survey of drought- and flood-affected farmers, and provide them compensation at the earliest.
