Rain destroys mud house of UP’s poorest lawmaker

LUCKNOW: The monsoon damaged last week the Uttar Pradesh junior social welfare minister’s biggest asset, a mud-and-thatch family home in his native village.

LUCKNOW: The monsoon damaged last week the Uttar Pradesh junior social welfare minister’s biggest asset, a mud-and-thatch family home in his native village.

HT Image

A smaller hut nearby survived the torrential rain and minister Banshidhar Bauddh’s entire family — his wife, five sons, three daughters-in-law, and their children — is now putting up there.

“Fortunately, we were not in the house when it collapsed,” said the 58-year-old farmer-politician, the poorest among 403 MLAs and 80 parliamentarians of India’s most-populous state.

Bauddh of the ruling Samajwadi Party has been a member of the legislative assembly since 2014 when he won the Balah constituency by-election. Chief minister Akhilesh Yadav inducted him into the cabinet in October 2015, but Bauddh’s assets did not change, except that his position brings a salary of about Rs 75,000 a month. That’s an incredible record in a country where most politicians declare wealth worth crores of rupees.

His election affidavit said he did not own any jewellery, and his cash and bank savings amounted to Rs 58,000. He did not have a PAN card. His wife had Rs 4,750 in cash and silver jewellery worth Rs 63,000. To top it all, he had an agriculture loan of Rs 1.25 lakh.

“The loan has been paid off,” he said, with the triumphant expression of a man happy wit his modest means, who doesn’t own a car and was not eligible to pay income tax before he became an MLA.

“I now have an official car which is better than my motorcycle.”

He continues to live in the hut in Tedia, an obscure village surrounded by forests in Bahraich district, and grows crops in his six-acre farm with his sons. Not that he shuns his official and political duties. He could be found in Lucknow when the assembly is in session and for official work that his post demands.

“My area is extremely backward. More than 45km is covered by forests and there is not a single college in a 50km radius,” he said on Sunday.

He has prepared a list of 70 houses that collapsed this rainy season in his constituency .“I will return to Lucknow after Independence Day and hand over the list to the chief minister and ask him to do something about it.”

The self-literate man never went to school, and worked as a chowkidar and ran a roadside kiosk to repair bicycle punctures to supplement the family income whenever crops failed.

He married off his two daughters last June in a simple ceremony in his village, 230km from the state capital. The chief minister turned up at the wedding.

Bauddh joined the Samajwa di Party shortly before the 2014 by-poll, in which he secured 52% of the votes. He was with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) earlier. The Samajwadi Party is likely to choose him again to contest the 2017 assembly elections.

Lack of basic infrastructure puts further strain on the arrival of vegetables, resulting in more wastage during peak time of production and because of their perishable nature producers have to sell immediately.

In general, producers do not gain when prices increase, the report pointed out. It outlined the need for building cold storage facilities in production centres, suggesting the government should improve infrastructure facilities by encouraging public-private partnership initiatives.