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Special assembly session on Punjab floods begins with tributes to victims
Chief minister Bhagwant Mann says new laws concerning compensation for flood victims will be introduced and approved during the two-day session.
The Punjab Vidhan Sabha on Friday paid tributes to the 59 people who lost their lives in the recent floods, the worst the state has seen in four decades.
At the outset of the special session, the MLAs paid tributes to former minister Harmail Singh Tohra, ex-MLA Raghubir Singh, lieutenant colonel Bhanu Pratap Singh Mankotia, acting lance daffadar (ALD) Daljit Singh, lance naik Rinku Singh, lance naik Pritpal Singh, sepoy Harminder Singh, actor Jaswinder Singh Bhalla, music composer Charanjit Ahuja and Ram Prashad Sharma, the brother of BJP MLA Ashwani Sharma.
The special session of the Punjab assembly from September 26-29 has been convened to discuss the recent floods that caused unprecedented devastation in the state.
Chief minister Bhagwant Mann said that the special session would focus on introducing people-oriented amendments to rules related to damage caused by the floods. He said new laws concerning compensation for flood victims would be introduced and approved during the session.
The session, which began at 11am with obituary references, went on to discuss the rehabilitation of Punjab.
There will be no sitting on September 27 and 28 being a weekend.
Proceedings will resume on September 29 with the resumption of the discussion.
Legislative business, if any, will be conducted after which the House will be adjourned sine die.
Damage pegged at ₹13,800 crore
Punjab faced one of its worst flood disasters in decades, primarily due to the swollen Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi rivers, along with seasonal rivulets resulting from heavy rainfall in their catchment areas in Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir. Heavy rains in Punjab exacerbated the flooding situation.
The worst-affected districts in the floods were Gurdaspur, Amritsar, Kapurthala, Pathankot, Hoshiarpur, Ferozepur, Fazilka and Tarn Taran.
Crops over five lakh acres were damaged in the floods.
Initial estimates pegged the total damage at around ₹13,800 crore.
Special girdawari (assessment of loss) is underway in the flood-hit areas to pay compensation to the affected people.
Slugfest over SDRF
During his recent visit to Punjab, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced a financial assistance of ₹1,600 crore for flood-hit Punjab in addition to the ₹12,000 crore already in the state’s kitty.
Later, a political slugfest erupted over the State Disaster Response Fund. CM Mann had claimed that the state received ₹5,012 crore under the SDRF since it was set up in 2010-11 and out of which ₹3,820 crore had been spent.
However, the Punjab BJP had accused the AAP government of misleading people about the ₹12,000 crore of funds, while citing a Comptroller and Auditor General of India report as per which, Punjab had ₹9,041.74 crore as SDRF funds till March 31, 2023. With the funds received for the years 2023-24, 2024-25, and 2025-26, the total amount reached ₹12,000 crore, the BJP had claimed.
Leader of Opposition in the state assembly Partap Singh Bajwa has written to Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, seeking clarity over the issue of SDRF funds.
