People's Democracy

BESIDES conspiring to undermine the public distribution system in Tripura, the centre is also underplaying the Left Front government’s solid success in upholding, with its meager means, the below-poverty-line (BPL) people’s right to get foodgrains. While expressing shock and surprise at the absolutely false information recently provided by the centre to the Supreme Court, chief minister Manik Sarkar and his food minister Gopal Das made this observation in separate press statements on September 5.

In an affidavit to the Supreme Court on September 3 in connection with the writ petition filed by an NGO, attorney general Soli Sorabji bracketed Tripura with the states that have not yet identified the BPL sections in their respective populations. In this regard, Manik Sarker replied to a newsman’s query at press conference called on September 5 to rebut the charge and also condemned the wily withdrawal of paramilitary forces from this insurgency-affected state. He said that despite the centre’s blatant non-cooperation in respect of providing foodgrains under the central schemes, the Left Front government has not let even a single person die of starvation. In addition, it identified the BPL sections in the state long ago, by head count. These sections were 74 per cent of the state’s population and a recent revision brought the figure down to 66.6 per cent. However, the centre arbitrarily takes it to be 50 per cent, by bracketing the state with Assam.

Same evening, in another press conference at the Civil Secretariat in Agartala, food minister Gopal Das said Tripura is the only state in the country that launched the scheme of providing foodgrains to the BPL mass way back on May 1, 1997. He informed newsmen that the state government would shortly bring the centre’s glaring misinformation campaign to the Supreme Court’s notice through a counter-affidavit. He also informed that, besides declining to provide foodgrains to the state under various schemes announced by the centre from time to time with much fanfare, it has also declined to open a buffer stock badly needed to run the PDS in this landlocked and backward state. He also expressed apprehension that a conspiracy is afoot to divert the railway wagons originally allotted to Tripura. This is aimed at unduly favouring some unscrupulous traders of Assam who might sabotage the PDS in Tripura by pouring into the state non-consumable foodgrains that are stocked in the FCI godowns. (INN)