Assam asked to submit report on funds utilisation

Centre should treat Assam floods as natural calamity: AGP

Huge amount has been kept unspent

Guwahati, Sep 11 : Though Assam has been allocated Rs. 210.62 crore under the Calamity Relief Fund for the year 2008-09, the Finance Ministry has not released the first instalment of the central share (Rs. 78.78 crore), due to be released in June, owing to non-submission of an utilisation report by the State government.
This was disclosed in a letter written by Minister of State in the Ministry of Home Affairs V. Radhika Selvi to Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) MP from the Lakhimpur Lok Sabha constituency Arun Kumar Sharma.

The letter was in response to the MP’s letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on June 14.

Ms. Selvi said the State government had been requested to expedite the submission of an utilisation report to the Finance Ministry to enable them to release the said amount. The government had not submitted any memorandum seeking additional assistance from the National Calamity Contingency Fund in the wake of floods during 2008, she pointed out.

Dr. Sharma, who distributed copies of Ms. Selvi’s letter to journalists here on Wednesday, alleged that the letter exposed the Congress-led State government’s indifference to the woes of the flood affected people.

Sufficient funds

The Union Minister also said the State government had sufficient balance from the available funds to meet the cost of flood relief operations.

The funds, according to Accountant General, amounted to Rs. 643.57 crore at the end of 2007-08.

Mr. Sharma and three other AGP MPs – Birendra Prasad Baishya, Kumar Dipak Das and Sarbananda Sonowal – alleged that while the ravaging annual floods had rendered thousands homeless, destroyed cropped land and lakhs of people were crying for relief and rehabilitation, the Tarun Gogoi-led government failed to submit a utilisation certificate and thereby deprived the flood affected people from due central assistance.

They also wanted to know why such a huge amount was kept unspent when thousands of people, displaced due to erosion and staying on embankments for years together, were yet to rehabilitated and not given adequate relief.

The AGP MPs also accused Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of discriminating the flood affected State people by not announcing any special assistance while promptly announcing special package for the flood affected in Bihar.

They said the Prime Minister should resign as a member of the Rajya Sabha from Assam as he had “failed to respond to the woes of lakhs of flood affected people of the State he represented in Parliament.”

Reacting to an from Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee and Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari to MPs to contribute Rs. 10 lakh each from the MP’s Local Area Development Scheme funds for reconstruction projects in flood-hit areas of Bihar, the AGP MPs urged Mr. Chatterjee and Mr. Ansari to issue similar appeal for Assam.

Statewide demonstration

The Assam State Kisan Sabha on Wednesday called for a State-wide farmers’ demonstration on September 16 to highlight a 10-point charter of demands such as declaring Assam’s flood and erosion problem as a national problem, distributing relief materials to the flood-hit families till the harvest of the next crop, desilting the cropped land, giving a compensation of Rs. 1 lakh to those rendered homeless and providing free seeds of Rabi crops by November and jobs to the flood-hit people under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

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Strict rules for PAN sought

Shillong, Sep 11 : The Khasi Students’ Union (KSU) has urged income tax commissioner H. Raikhan to issue PAN cards only to those applicants who provide necessary documents to prove that they are residents of Meghalaya.

The KSU in a letter addressed to the commissioner recently said there was a trend of issuing PAN cards to people who do not produce any valid documents including photo identity cards.

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IRB kids protest ‘eviction’

Imphal, Sep 11 : It was a long day of demonstrations in Imphal.

In one, the children of IRB personnel demonstrated at the gate of the Kangla Fort, three days after their mothers had done the same, to protest against the government’s decision to evict them from the fort.
In the other, students and sportspersons, led by the coordinating committee spearheading the Monika Devi campaign, took out a rally after which the government warned the Centre that the state would burn if the probe into the weightlifter’s case failed to nail the culprits. The failure would be construed as an act of discrimination against people of the state, it added.

The children of IRB personnel demanded an alternative place to stay if they were shifted from Kangla. “We have come from far-off places in the hills. Our village does not have any school. If I go back to my village I would not be able to attend classes. My father is a rifleman and cannot afford to rent a place in Imphal,” T. Haokip from Churachandpur district said.

As part of the security for Ibobi Singh and Raj Bhavan complex, the government has decided to remove the families of the IRB from Kangla seven days after the September 1 attack on the chief minister’s office complex.

Nearly 250 children of IRB personnel live inside the fort and study in Imphal schools. Many of them are from far-off places such as Jiribam, 222km from Imphal.

However, after the quit notice, the government has not made any attempt to forcibly remove the families.

Another protest was organised by the Democratic Students’ Alliance of Manipur, All Manipur Students’ Federation and Manipuri Students’ Federation under the aegis of the coordinating committee.

The committee warned that it would approach international sports organisations seeking justice if the ongoing inquiries failed to book the guilty officials.

It had suspended its decision not to send Manipuri players to national and international games in view of the CBI inquiry and the probe by former Chief Election Commissioner T.S. Krishnamurthy.

Manipur has missed nearly 10 national and zonal meets. The meeting also resolved to move court against the sports officials who had “conspired” against Monika.

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7,000 kids caught in refugee tangle

Guwahati, Sep 10 : The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has set a 40-day deadline for providing food vouchers to 7,000 Reang tribal children caught in a refugee tussle between Mizoram and Tripura.

A similar timeframe for submitting action taken report has been set vis-à-vis thousands of Adivasi and Muslim children languishing in relief camps in western Assam following ethnic riots in 1996.
A cloud of uncertainty has been hovering above these children ever since 32,000 Reangs or Brus fled ethnic riots in Mizoram in 1997 and took shelter in adjoining Tripura. The Mizoram government’s refusal to accommodate most of these refugees in the electoral rolls – Assembly elections in the State are due in less than a year – has stonewalled Tripura’s repatriation efforts.

“Whether in Assam or Tripura, these children are being denied nutrition, immunization, proper sanitation, health facilities and education. We have asked the governments to appoint nodal officers to specifically look into the children’s woes,” said NCPCR chairperson Shantha Sinha here on Wednesday. Most of the children, she added, were born in the refugee camps and are regarded as “nobody’s babies”.

Led by Sinha, a NCPCR team visited camps of displaced persons in Assam and Tripura from September 5. The Tripura trip followed complaints from the New Delhi-based Asian Indigenous and Tribal Peoples’ Network that 7,000 refugee children were virtually starving after denial of ration cards. Tripura has since re-surveyed the camps and has pledged ration cards by October.

According to senior officials in Agartala, the refugee problem was weighing down heavily on Tripura. “Even intervention from the Union government as well as the National Human Rights Commission has failed to cut any ice,” a senior officer said.

The refugees, housed in six makeshift camps, have refused to budge until they are assured of safety back home in Mizoram. “The Mizoram government has played into the hands of parochial organizations like Young Mizo Association and Mizo Zirlai Pawl who call us outsiders,” said refugee leader Elvis Chorky.

Notably, Mizoram’s stand goes against the Election Commission of India’s guideline for inclusion of the refugees in the voters’ list. Some 18,000 voters living in the camps had earlier been given electoral photo identity cards.

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