Bhubaneswar: The Bharatiya Janata Party Sunday lodged a complaint with the police against two top bureaucrats for “spreading falsehood using government funds”. Senior party functionaries submitted the complaint to Assistant Commissioner of Police Assem Kumar Panda at the Capital police station. Recently, the state health and family welfare department had advertised that more than 1 crore people had benefited under the Biju Swasthya Kalyan Yojna (BSKY) within two months of its launch.
The party expressed doubt about the government claims and alleged that the secretary of the department, PK Meharada, had colluded with the secretary of Information and public relations department, HK Sharma, to publish the misleading advertisement to build the image of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik.
“The advertisement is not only false, fabricated and concocted but also contains incorrect information that has caused injury to the public as such a vast number of people could not have availed the benefits under the said scheme within only two months,” the party said.
It pointed out that during 2016-17 about 12.6 lakh families had benefited from Rastriya Swasthya Bima Yojna (RSBY), Biju Krushak Kalyan Yojana and the Odisha State Treatment Fund. Of them 9.8 lakh (about 77 per cent) families benefited under the central government funded RSBY.
The party said the state government had earmarked Rs 1,003 crore for the scheme that translates to a meagre Rs 1,000 per patient. Also, if the claimed beneficiaries were to have availed the benefits, the whole budgetary allocation for the scheme would have been exhausted by now and the remaining five months of the current fiscal would leave beneficiaries without benefits of the scheme.