Warning the Congress of facing an inquiry into graft charges leveled against it during the last two and half years of its tenure in the Government if Bharatiya Janata Party is elected to govern, Union Power Minister and senior party leader Piyush Goyal said on Tuesday that the State is yet to rise to its full potential in areas like tourism, power and micro and medium enterprises. Invoking the former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee while addressing a Press conference in Dehradun, he said that the dream of the leader that fired him to carve out the State in 2000 has remained unfulfilled despite sixteen years having passed since its inception.
“The Centre is determined to expedite development in every state of the country. However, Uttarakhand is lagging behind because the state government here failed to keep up with the pace. Instead of accepting their own failure, they are blaming the Centre. How laggard they are can be gauged from the fact that the CM of the state cared to meet me only once over the past two and half years I have been the Power Minister,” Goyal said.
Affirming that the Centre does not discriminate among the States in the matter of development, he cited the instance of the Union transport minister Nitin Gadkari laying out all- weather road projects worth Rs 11,500 crore for the State. “Once the road comes up the footfalls of the foreign and domestic tourists will rise and raise the development graph of the State,” he said.
Blaming political instability for the sluggish pace of development in the state, he said that stability would be restored once BJP is elected.
Taking a dig at Congress, he said that Congress government had scuttled the lokayukta Act passed during the BJP government's term.
Mentioning the tremendous scope loaded in the power sector, he said that the upcoming BJP government would harness it through the project based on run of the river to generate abundance of power. “As far as the Union power ministry is concerned we have been giving 17 percent more electricity to the state. Now, 2000 MW surplus power being available at power exchange, the state is withdrawing electricity as per its convenience. “It is great achievement on the part of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi that now the country has become power surplus from being a power deficit one,” he said.
like other BJP leaders swarming the state to campaign, Goyal mentioned the Centre granting the long-pending One Rank One Pension (OROP) demand. “ Congress leader Sonia Gandhi first talked about OROP on November 20, 2002 while addressing a meeting in Chandigarh. During general election-2004, the party included it in its manifesto while saying that the matter would be re-examined and address expeditiously. In June 2004, the President in her budget speech mentioned that welfare of the ex-servicemen would be the government’s priority. In 2008, then defence minister AK Antony said in the parliament that OROP was not upto the mark. In the run-up to general election-2014, they earmarked Rs 500 crore in the interim budget for OROP,” he said.
To strike a chord with the defence personnel, he invoked the surgical strike in Pak-Occupied Kashmir, saying that it was meant to eliminate the terrorists plotting to dismember India.
However, he did not mention the figures of the terrorists killed during the strike and that of the soldiers and the civilians who were killed in the aftermath of the strike.