BHUBANESWAR: As the Opposition BJP and Congress disrupted proceedings in the Assembly on the first day of the winter session over the Mamita Meher murder case, the ruling BJD on Wednesday raised the issue of Central neglect by alleging inadequate sanction of houses to Odisha under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) scheme.
BJD MLAs took out a padayatra from the Assembly to the Raj Bhavan and staged a protest alleging that the Centre has deprived Odisha’s poor people of getting the houses. A delegation of BJD MLAs submitted a memorandum to the Governor Prof Ganeshi Lal stating that the State government had identified 6.07 lakh more beneficiaries from 16 districts to be benefited under the PMAY scheme. However, the beneficiaries could not be covered under it as the Rural Development Ministry closed the window of the Awas Plus portal used for geo-tagging, it added.
The memorandum alleged that the Centre ignored several letters written by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to the Prime Minister in this regard. As a result, a large number of scheduled tribe people mainly from western and southern districts of the State were deprived of getting houses under the Central scheme. The Centre had sanctioned 1,77,528 houses under the scheme for Odisha out of which, 98,203 houses have already been constructed, the memoradum stated.
The BJP, however, described the BJD protest as a tactic to divert the people’s attention from the Mamita Meher murder case. The BJD is raising various other issues from the first day of the winter session only to divert attention from the sensational murder case, Opposition Chief Whip Mohan Majhi said.