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70 pc cut in drug prices from Oct 2
LOK JANSHAKTI Party president and Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan on Monday announced there would be a 70 per cent cut in medicine prices from October 2. Such a drastic cut had been mooted to save lives of those who would otherwise die for want of medicines, he said. The Central Government, he said, would also float an ambitious health insurance scheme by paying around Rs 3,000 crore as premium for the benefit of those living below the poverty line.
LOK JANSHAKTI Party president and Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan on Monday announced there would be a 70 per cent cut in medicine prices from October 2.
Such a drastic cut had been mooted to save lives of those who would otherwise die for want of medicines, he said. The Central Government, he said, would also float an ambitious health insurance scheme by paying around Rs 3,000 crore as premium for the benefit of those living below the poverty line. He was speaking at a public meeting at Sahson crossing, about 20 km from here.
His party had no intention to gain power at the cost of the self-respect of the poor, he said. “We are in fact working to awaken their self-respect,” he added.
During his tenure as Communication Minister, he said, he had got stamps issued in the name of several great personalities, irrespective of their caste background. He accused Mayawati of being engaged in converting the Bahujan Samaj Party into ‘Brahmin Samaj Party’. She had gone to the extent of changing the slogan, ‘Tilak, tarazu aur talwar’ to ‘Hathi nahin Ganesh hai, Brahma Vishnu Mahesh hai’, he said.
Paswan said the Samajwadi Party and the BJP were two sides of the same coin.
The country, he said, could never become strong as long as people raised slogans in the name of religion and caste.
If Khudiram Bose laid down his life for the country, so did Bahadur Shah Zafar, Ashfaqullah, Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad, he said.
It appeared that the BJP and the Samajwadi Party had forgotten sacrifices of people from different castes, he alleged.
He said situation in UP was worse than Bihar, adding that the LJP had decided to contest the elections with the help of VP Singh’s Jan Morcha and some other smaller parties. All would combine to form the Third Front, he added. Earlier, he inaugurated Kisan Mela in Phulpur, under the aegis of National Fertilizer Ltd. “We have not allowed fertilizer cost to go up,” he said.
Efforts were on to supply fertilizer to the farmers at several times cheaper rates than the present cost, he said. But this would be possible only after gas-based plants started functioning, he said.
