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Rahul Gandhi to tour flood-affected areas in Assam today
Rahul Gandhi will visit Lakhimpur, meet flood-affected residents, and take stock of the relief and rehabilitation measures.
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi will visit flood-affected areas in upper Assam on Thursday, two days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to take stock of the situation in the region.
The 47-year-old opposition leader will visit Lakhimpur, the worst affected of the 29 districts in the state, meet flood-affected residents, and take stock of the relief and rehabilitation measures.
“He will first land in Guwahati and take a chopper to Lakhimpur. After meeting with affected people he will fly to Silchar to pay respects to former party leader Santosh Mohan Dev, who passed away on Wednesday,” senior Congress leader Pradyut Bordoloi said.
Gandhi will return back to Delhi later in the evening.
On Tuesday, Modi held three meetings here with chief ministers and officials of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, and Nagaland — four states affected by floods — and announced a relief package of Rs 2,000 crore.
The PM, however, didn’t conduct an aerial survey of the affected areas or meet residents displaced by the floods like he did in Gujarat a week ago — a move which drew flak from opposition leaders in Assam.
Modi also announced Rs 250 crore as immediate relief to Assam and setting up of a high powered committee to study the course of the Brahmaputra with a corpus of Rs 100 crores for the project.
But former Assam chief minister and senior Congress leader Tarun Gogoi termed the total relief package announced by Modi as “meagre” and blamed the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state for failing to present a real picture of the damage to the Prime Minister.
Two days after Modi’s announcement, there is still no clarity on what would be the share of each of the flood-affected states from the total package of Rs 2,000 crore.
Addressing the media on Tuesday, Assam water resources minister Keshab Mahanta said the state’s share would be Rs 1,200 crore.
But, a Press Information Bureau (PIB) release mentioned Rs 1,200 crore would be given for the infrastructure sector alone without clarifying whether that sum would come to Assam.
With 84 deaths till Wednesday, Assam is the worst-affected of all the northeastern states. Flooding has affected over 2 million people in the state, displaced over 1.3 lakh and damaged over 2 lakh hectares of crop area.
