TEAM HERALD
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PANJIM: While admitting that a financial package is not a ‘permanent’ solution for rehabilitating mining affected people, Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday turned its guns on the Prime Minister, Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar and Minister of Environment and Forests, in renewed inter party mug slinging on the mining suspension issue which has taken centrestage.
“Prime Minister is incapable of giving financial aid to the State”, BJP spokesman Dr Wilfred Mesquita told media persons, and termed Union Minister for Agriculture Sharad Pawar’s move to lead an all party delegation to Delhi on February 18 as a ‘publicity stunt’.
Mesquita also called Union Minister for Environment and Forest (MoEF) Jayanti Natrajan as anti-mining activist.
“There is no point in taking a delegation to Prime Minister or Congress President Sonia Gandhi seeking their intervention in resolving the mining crisis. We need to concentrate on MoEF, which has suspended environment clearances and one of the respondents in the case before Supreme Court. The Union Minister is completely an anti-mining person,” Dr Mesquita said adding ‘Pawar is exploiting the situation’.
BJP said that they won’t be party to the delegation unless called by Prime Minister.
“We have already filed a detail affidavit in the Supreme Court and we are hopeful of some positive result at the earliest,” the BJP spokesman said.
Dr Mesquita, however, admitted that financial package cannot be a permanent solution to the problem but can work as a ‘means to overcome the emergency’. “Pawar needs to ensure that State gets financial assistance from Centre,” he added.
Pawar who met pro-mining agitators, protesting at Azad Maidan, earlier this month had tagged Goa government’s financial assistance package to mining dependent people as “fashion”. BJP had then targeted Pawar for politicizing the issue.
Government has announced monthly cash compensation between Rs 3000 to Rs 6000 to the affected people at a cost of Rs 15 crore to the public exchequer, every month.
