E-Paper
Free colour TV scheme: Over 1,000 TVs bought under DMK tenure, found locked
Chennai: More than thousand colour television sets purchased by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government during the fag end of its previous regime (2006-2011) have been found locked up inside a community hall in Semmandalam in Cuddalore district for 11 years
Chennai: More than thousand colour television sets purchased by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government during the fag end of its previous regime (2006-2011) have been found locked up inside a community hall in Semmandalam in Cuddalore district for 11 years. These colour television sets were not distributed after the AIADMK was elected in 2011 and remained in power until this year.
The television sets were part of DMK’s free colour television scheme which it had promised before the 2006 assembly elections.
After the DMK came back to power this May, the local residents who wanted to use the community hall and local vernacular media drew the attention of the newly appointed district collector K Balasubramaniam that the television sets have been lying idle stacked up inside cartons.
“There are likely to be 1,000 TVs. We will count them shortly,” said Balasubramaniam . The hall where the TVs are stored is now locked and sealed and two police constables are working in shifts to protect the premises round-the-clock. “We don’t want anti-social elements to enter,” the collector said. The district officials are planning to rope in engineers to check the condition of the TVs. The working TVs will be distributed to government-run institutions such as anganwadis and hospitals.
HT reached out to Tamil Nadu Civil Supplies Department Corporation but they did not respond to calls and messages.
In June 2011, J Jayalalithaa scrapped the flagship free colour TV distribution scheme of the M Karunanidhi regime she had decimated in the assembly polls. She had ordered that the 127,000 remaining television sets that were to be distributed be given to hospitals, schools, orphanages and panchayats.
A senior bureaucrat who worked in the chief minister’s special cell at that time recalled this order. “Also all districts were instructed to send the TVs that were not distributed to warehouses,” the official said, not wishing to be identified. “All districts followed the instructions. There could have been some law and order issue why Cuddalore district didn’t distribute or send it to warehouses.”
Ariyalur district collector P Ramana Saraswathi has asked revenue officials to inspect and report if any such television sets purchased under the scheme are stored away as in the case of Cuddalore. Saraswathi who was the revenue officer of Tirunelveli district during the previous regime said that they had distributed the excess television sets. “There were only about a 100 TVs left in Tirunelveli in 2012,” she says. “We distributed it to hostels run by the Adi Dravidar and Tribal welfare department and to old age homes. Now that I’ve been appointed in Ariyalur, I’ve voluntarily asked for officials to follow up on this.”
It was among several programmes of the Karunanidhi government that Jayalalithaa reversed which she termed corrupt after returning to power; riding on the 2G-spectrum scam. She accused the DMK of running this scheme to favour local cable television franchises, which was owned by the Marana brothers, Kalanidhi and Dayanidhi, who are grandnephews of Karunanidhi.
At that time, Jayalalithaa had said in the Tamil Nadu assembly that the DMK had planned to distribute 1 million TV sets in the 6th phase of the scheme when the government was in transition. Of these some 0.75 million TVs had to be procured but Jayalaithaa cancelled them.
The DMK has defended providing colour televisions as a means to offer exposure to the economically weaker sections via TV programmes and as a mark of self respect so that poor people didn’t have to watch television through the windows of others’ homes. “In 2011, several TVs were stored across Tamil Nadu but we don’t know what happened to them,” says R S Bharathi, DMK’s organising secretary and Rajya Sabha MP. “Kalaignar (Karunanidhi) had issued a statement that they were not being distributed to beneficiaries. Jayalalithaa freezed the scheme which she should have continued,” he said adding that concerned government departments are following up on this case.
The DMK government had spent around ₹3,687 crore in the five years in its 2006-2011 regime to purchase 10.64 million television sets. The average cost of a television set was about ₹2,265 purchased by ELCOT (Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu Limited). “People are still using these TVs. The picture clarity is substandard but free TVs meant for public lying idle for a decade is definitely dumping the taxpayers money in the dustbin,” said political commentator Maalan Narayanan.
