Accusing the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) and the Congress to hide their failures by raising irrelevant issues to divert people’s attention, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Thursday said both the parties are indulging in falsehood as reality is just opposite of their allegations on water and electricity.
Reacting over the recent protest of the BJP leaders at the Delhi Jal Board (DJB) headquarter, national spokesperson Raghav Chadha said that the party is trying to divert attention from its failure of the municipal corporations ruled by it by staging a ‘drama’ at DJB office. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders on Tuesday and Wednesday gheraoed the office of the DJB Chief Executive Officer in Jhandelwalan in the national Capital over the water scarcity in the city.
Chadha said the BJP revealed how shallow and out of depth it is on the issue of water when its leaders and their supporters spent hours at the DJB office playing antakshari instead of raising any pertinent issues. Chadha said, “Despite spending hours at the DJB office, the leaders of the BJP were unable to point to a single specific problem related to water supply in the city,” he said.
Chadha attacked the BJP for its support to the water tanker mafia in the city. He said “The real concern of the BJP is that for the last 4.5 years, the Arvind Kejriwal Government has been cracking down on illegal private water supply and the tanker mafia, which has been run with the direct support of the BJP and the Congress over the last decades.”
He further said that the only reason the ‘drama company’ is in action is that Manoj Tiwari, Vijay Goel and Vijendra Gupta are in a power tussle within the BJP to become their chief ministerial face.
Chadha said that more than 80-85 per cent of the city has access to piped water. Many parts of the so-called “dry zones” like Dwarka, Bijwasan, Palam, Najafgarh, in the South and South-West regions of Delhi are now getting piped water for the first time since independence.
The DJB is supplying 940 MGD of water to Delhi, which is higher than ever before. No Government has supplied this much-piped water in Delhi’s history. In fact, June 2019 marks an extraordinary situation where DJB is actually running at 105 per cent of its own capacity in order to cater to the growing demand for water,” he added.
Meanwhile, Delhi Power minister Satyendra Jain hit out at the Congress over electricity uproar. Jain said that the current rates of electricity in Delhi are “cheaper” than what consumers used to pay during the former Chief Minister of Delhi Sheila Dikshit regime.
Comparing the prices of electricity during Dikshit’s tenure, Power Minister of Delhi Satyendra Jain on Wednesday said that in 2010, during the Congress Government, for a 1 kW meter reading 50 units, the bill generated was of Rs 153. “In 2013, this escalated to Rs 264. Within three years, bills went up by 73 per cent during Sheila Dikshit’s tenure. Today, for the same consumption, Delhi pays only Rs 128 which is approximately half of the bill in 2013,” he said
Similarly, for a consumption of 100 units, the bill in 2013 would amount to Rs 485, but today consumers have to pay just Rs 211. Consumers in Delhi pay about half under the AAP government compare to what they had to pay during Congress rule,” he added.
Projecting the rate of increase in power tariffs during Dikshit’s rule, Jain said “If Sheila Dikshit had continued to be in the office, the bill for 50 units would have been around Rs 760 per month, however, today it is just Rs 128. This means a saving of Rs 632 per month because of the Kejriwal Government,” he said, adding that the consumers would have been paying five times of what they are paying today if Dikshit had continued to be in power.”
Jain said, “Delhi purchases power from both MP and Chhattisgarh but the people of these states pay three times of what the people of Delhi are paying. If Delhi can do so despite being a buyer of power from these states, why can’t these states supply power to their residents at the price Delhi can?
He also compared the status of availability of power between the current AAP government and the Congress Government. He said, “There was a time when all shopkeepers owned generator sets and all households owned inverters. Since the AAP Government has come to power in 2015, people have stopped purchasing inverters. There is a reliable supply of 24x7 powers in Delhi today.” “I urge the Congress to refrain from making false and baseless allegations and focus its energies on supplying power in Congress-ruled states for prices as low as those in Delhi,” said Jain.