Shimla: The Himachal Pradesh Vidhan Sabha witnessed noisy scenes during Question Hour Thursday, with the opposition BJP members leaving the House accusing the Congress government of not replying to their queries on funds released by a cooperative bank.
The BJP members were agitated after Deputy Chief Minister Mukesh Agnihotri said that “information is being collected” while replying to a question by Ashish Sharma of the BJP on the disbursement of funds by the Kangra Central Cooperative Bank to the Mahila Mandals under the Dehra Assembly constituency in June and July last year.
Expressing dissatisfaction over the reply, Sharma said getting information in a digital era was not difficult, claiming that he had information that Rs 50,000 was released to many Mahila Mandals between June 1 and July 10, 2024, by the bank.
Sharma also asked whether the money was disbursed during the code of conduct period, saying if it was, central agencies should conduct a probe into the matter.
Joining the debate, Leader of Opposition (LoP) Jai Ram Thakur accused the state government of trying to conceal information, claiming that the model code of conduct was in force when the money was disbursed by the bank.
Thakur also wondered if the grants were released only to the Mahila Mandals in Dehra, or in other places as well, as he asked whether the government would provide information on the matter during the current session of the Assembly.
Speaker Kuldeep Singh Pathania, who earlier asked Sharma to place the information he claimed to have collected before the House for the Vidhan Sabha Secretariat to investigate it, termed the action of the BJP members to leave the House unwarranted and against the rules.
Agnihotri, meanwhile, asked Sharma why he was asking for the information (on funds disbursement) if he already had it with him.
“When we were in the opposition, we also did not get replies to many questions,” Agnihotri said, as he termed the action of the BJP members to leave the House pre-planned since it did not have any solid issue against the government.
Agnihotri also pointed out that before the Lok Sabha polls in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had released the first instalment of funds under the PM-Kisan Samman Nidhi to farmers.
To this, Bikram Thakur of the BJP said that releasing funds under the Kisan Samman Nidhi and depositing money into the accounts of Mahila Mandals during elections were two different issues, accusing the government of drawing the wrong parallels to avoid answering the opposition’s questions.
PTI
