Alleging that the opposition, especially Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, was engaged in ‘spit and run’ by making unrealistic and fake charges against the ruling dispensation, the Yogi government claimed that Yadav’s charges on JE and AES deaths in Gorakhpur were baseless and sans basis.
“Akhilesh Yadav is projecting fake figures and trying to do politics over the deaths of children. After wild allegations against the government, he is now sending wrong information to the media too,” said government spokesperson and UP minister Sidharth Nath Singh.
Talking to reporters in Lucknow on Tuesday, Singh categorically claimed that between January and November last year, 229 cases of JE and 18 deaths were reported in the state. “Similarly, 2026 AES cases and around 100 deaths of children were reported this year,” he added.
“It seems that the former Chief Minister misread the figures and said 1,000 deaths occurred in the last one year, when it was around 100. He added an extra zero just to blame the government,” Singh said.
On Monday, Akhilesh had said at a press conference that the Yogi government was raking up the deaths of children in a hospital in Kota (Rajasthan) even when 1,000 children had died in Gorakhpur in 2019.
Singh further claimed that after BJP government came to power in 2017, JE was almost eradicated with a massive vaccination programme that covered 1.5 crore children in Purvanchal.
“Similarly, in AES, in which cleanliness is the only preventive measure, the government went for ODF in 38 districts and reached out to 66 lakh families in three phases under its Dastak programme to make people aware about cleanness, due to which around 70 to 80 per cent decline in AES cases was reported since 2016,” the minister claimed.