Protesting against Punjab Government’s decision to close 800 primary schools, the school students and their parents on Friday presented roses to Amritsar Deputy Commissioner demanding to withdraw the move.
A large number of school students were brought along by the agitating Akali leaders besides their parents and representatives of as many as 30 village panchayats to register their protest against the move.
SAD leaders, led by the former minister and party general secretary Bikram Majithia, also submitted memorandum to Deputy Commissioner KS Sangha after staging a dharna in front of the DC’s office on the issues of school closure, power tariff hike, and introduction of new taxes.
Supporting the cause of the students, Majithia said that in a welfare State, it was the duty of the Government to provide primary education to children at their doorstep. “Instead of expanding on the primary school network established by the previous SAD-BJP Government led by Parkash Singh Badal, the Congress Government had decided to shut down 800 schools, including 30 in Amritsar district,” he said.
Asking the Government to rescind this decision immediately, Majithia alleged that this would have an adverse impact on the economically weaker section of society and was by nature anti-rural and anti-dalit.
Meanwhile, a number of people participated in the dharna and demanded immediate revocation of the steep power hike of 10 to 12 per cent on domestic power consumption which was being implemented with retrospective effect from April 2017.
The people averred that urbanites had already been put under stress with the introduction of municipal tax equivalent to two per cent of power bills in all towns and cities and could not bear the burden of an additional 12 per cent hike in power tariff.
Majithia said that the government had put an Rs 2,500 crore burden through this hike and SAD would launch a people’s movement to force the government to withdraw the same.
He also asked the farmers, participating in the dharna, not to allow the government to install electricity meters on their tube wells. “The government is doing this in a clandestine manner with the excuse that it wanted to check consumption. The real agenda is to impose power bills on farmers,” he said.
Majithia maintained that more anti-people measures were are in the offing, and we must all unite to ensure they were not implemented.