Govt showed UP funds as Kumbh grant

The Centre providing Rs. 800 crore additional funds to organise the Kumbh Mela in January-February 2013 at Allahabad was a farce. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Aug 12, 2013, 02:23:44 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Centre providing Rs. 800 crore additional funds to organise the Kumbh Mela in January-February 2013 at Allahabad was a farce.

In fact, funds meant to tackle backwardness, irrigation and urban development, was taken from Uttar Pradesh government’s kitty and shown as central government’s grant for the Mela.

All this happened because the finance ministry refused to agree with the Planning Commission’s decision to give UP special central financial assistance of Rs. 800 crore for organising Kumbh Mela, the biggest religious congregation of Hindus.

The decision was to keep Samajwadi Party-led UP government in good humour after it had assured of unconditional outside support to the UPA government. But, documents with HT shows the plan panel did not realise that the finance ministry was not willing to play ball.

The finance ministry in October 2012 told the panel that the proposed central assistance of Rs. 800 crore to Uttar Pradesh for organising the Mela cannot be met.

Panel’s deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia wrote to finance minister P Chidrambaram last November suggesting that the commission will identify savings of Rs. 800 crore in UP’s annual plan allocation for 2012-13.

The panel decided to deduct Rs. 400 crore from Accelerated Irrigation Programme, Rs. 200 crore each from Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission and BRGF to pay for the Mela.

The logic given by the panel for deductions was that expenditure in these schemes in the first seven months of financial year 2012-13 was very low.

While Ahluwalia and UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav claim credit for organizing the successful Mela, the reality was that the Centre did not give anything extra for the event.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More