People's Democracy

HARYANA

Travesty of Justice or Mockery of Poverty!

THE Haryana state unit of the CPI(M) has decided to intensity its efforts for seeking relief for those poor families who are being asked to repay for the benefits received following their exclusion from the below poverty line (BPL) list, as directed by the administration on the orders of the Punjab and Haryana High Court.

The Haryana state secretariat of the party, in its recent meeting, expressed grave concern over the utter insensitivity and dubious attitude of the state government of not challenging this peculiar order before a full bench. Instead, the government is taking recourse to coercive methods for a recovery of the huge amounts of money in lieu of the benefits received as the BPL. Such affected people have been made to desperately run from pillar to post and no one is there to listen to their ordeal.

In a statement issued from Rohtak on June 26, the CPI(M)’s state secretary Inderjit Singh termed as highly despicable the state government’s orders to ask for the recovery of even kanyadaan money, the money spent on toilet construction under the Sampuran Sawachhta scheme, school children’s scholarship etc, with as high as 21 per cent interest. He said one simply failed to understand whether it was a travesty of justice or a mockery of poverty. He wondered how the recent survey was taken to be valid, on its face value, while several families now deleted from the BPL category are actually poor widows or physically handicapped people, and are leading a hand to mouth life. Many such aggrieved persons, with their recovery notices, joined the party’s picketing action of government offices during the last week of May.

The CPI(M) is astonished that the larger problem of several actually poor families has not been addressed in the High Court order and that they remained excluded from the BPL list even in the previous surveys. The party has decided to intensify its actions during the coming July in order to pressurise the state government for seeking a stay order and filing a review petition in the matter. The party will also explore appropriate methods for legal intervention in this regard.