UP Budget session from today

The Budget session of the Uttar Pradesh legislature beginning from Thursday is likely to be stormy as the Opposition is determined to take the Akhilesh Yadav Government head on over the deteriorating law and order, power crisis, non-payment of sugarcane dues and the failures on other public related issues.

Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, who is also the state Finance Minister, will present the Budget for 2014-15 in the Assembly on June 20. This will be the first time after the lok Sabha election in which all political parties got a drubbing from the Bharatiya Janata Party in the state, that the legislators will sit in the Assembly to discuss issues related to the people.The UP Government had passed a vote-on-account for four months in February for the current fiscal. 

Assembly officials said that the Budget session of the Vidhan Sabha would continue till July 18.The BJP is in an upbeat mood after winning 73 of the total 80 lok Sabha seats in the state in the recent parliamentary elections and it will certainly give a hard time to the Government over the spurt of rape incidents in the state.   However, the BJP will feel the absence of its leader of the House leader Hukum Singh who has been elected to the lok Sabha. the party’s deputy leader, Satish Mahana, will be the acting leader till the new one is elected. 

In the legislative Council too, BJP’s leader Nepal Singh has been elected to the lok Sabha and now deputy leader Om Prakash Singh will be acting as leader. 

Interestingly, like the BJP, the Congress will also feel the absence of their veteran leader Pramod Tewari as he has been elected to Rajya Sabha and his daughter has been elected in his place.Meanwhile, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Mohammad Azam Khan said the Government was ready to reply to all the questions of the Opposition and would disclose the conspiracy hatched by the political opponents against the Government on law and order and power crisis issues. 

The Budget session will also decide whether the Samajwadi Party Government will continue its populist schemes like laptop distribution and sops for youths and Muslim girls. “Wait for the Budget , if there is an allocation then these schemes are through but if there is no allocation then they are scrapped,” officials said.There is a debate within the ruling Samajwadi Party over continuation of the laptop scheme after the lok Sabha election debacle. UP minister Gayatri Prasad Prajapati had announced that the laptop scheme would be shelved but the Chief Minister said it was the minister’s personal view.