BHUBANESWAR: The BJP on Wednesday targeted BJD MP Pinaki Mishra for his remarks on Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in the Lok Sabha during his speech on President’s address. Addressing mediapersons, BJP Mahila Morcha president Smruti Patnaik said Mishra’s statement in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday that the claim made by President Droupadi Murmu on the success of the Ujjwala Yojana in her address to the Parliament is clearly an exaggeration, has been properly addressed by Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Hardeep Singh Puri in his tweets.
Murmu in her address had said the government has been providing cooking gas connections to more than 55,000 beneficiaries daily since 2014 to which Mishra said it appears to be an inflated number and all members of the house are privy to the fact. “It is essential to consider how many people refill their first gas cylinder in the first year. As per a 2022 RTI report 8.9 crore connections were issued under the scheme of which 90 lakh beneficiaries did not take single refill while 1.08 crore families managed to take single refill in a year,” Mishra said. He added, “Perhaps the then petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan who came to light for the scheme could not pay proper attention to the problem of the housewives as he was busy helping (Gautam) Adani putting up an LNG terminal at Dhamra (in Bhadrak district).”
Responding to the BJD MP, Puri in a series of tweets said Mishra needs to be reminded that since 2014, public sector oil marketing companieshave given out more than 19 crore (19.37 crore between April 2014 and December 2022) LPG connections. “If you average it for last 8.75 years and 365 days a year (although connections are only given on about 310 working days a year), the average number of connections per day is more than 60,000,” he said.