Targeting the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday staged a demonstration near the Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s residence against rising pollution levels in Delhi.
Addressing the protestors who were carrying placards and rent the air with slogans of ‘Kejriwal shame, shame’ ,Adesh Gupta , President, Delhi BJP said despite repeated promises to clean the river Yamuna and make it the Thames of London, the fact is it has only got more polluted with over 4400 million liters of polluted water falling into the river. In fact, cases of lung cancer, asthma and other air-borne diseases are only on the rise due to pollution, he added
Gupta said, “The Kejriwal government in the last four years collected an amount of Rs 883 crore from people of Delhi in the name of green cess, it has spent only 1.6 per cent of it on controlling pollution whose level has now gone alarming with no concrete steps to check and contain it.”
He said the Kejriwal government is only busy in falsehood and propaganda without doing any actual work on the ground level and rather, it was stalling all developmental activities in the city due to which not only pollution level but overall situation is worsening.
Talking about the Green budget of the Kejriwal government, Gupta said though on stubble burning, he made a lot of hue and cry, but figures show last year the government spent only Rs 40000 in buying bio decomposer units while Rs 24 lac was spent on their distribution and another whopping Rs 9 crore on its publicity but a mere 300 farmers benefited from it. The fact is 24 promises were made in Green budget including planting of 6 crore trees, new electric buses, and smog towers, but nothing has materialized, he charged.
Extensively quoting from an NGO’s Greenpeace Southeast Asia report, he said 54000 people died of pollution-related diseases in the capital last year alone or a daily average of 148 deaths and asked who is responsible for this. But Kejriwalji seems to be least bothered, he charged.