Kasaragod: BJP candidate in Kasaragod Lok Sabha constituency M L Ashwini kept the Lie Detector buzzing during her interaction with media at the Press Club on Wednesday, March 13.
Ashwini, a seasoned election campaigner for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 10 states, including Karnataka and Gujarat, said the food kits distributed to the people of Kerala by the LDF government were funded by the BJP-led Union government.
"Here, the Pinarayi (Vijayan) government just gave kits in the name of Pinarayi. Whatever was in the kit came from the central government," said Ashwini, National Executive Member of Bharatiya Janata Mahila Morcha and Manjeshwar Block panchayat member.
The BJP candidate did not get a free pass and was asked to explain from which fund did the Union government support the free food kit scheme and apart from Kerala, how many states benefited from the Union government scheme. She said the Karnataka government also distributed food kits but did not have an answer on how the Union government funded the scheme.
During the pandemic, several BJP accounts and sympathisers took to social media to claim that the food kits were funded by the Union government.
The food kit scheme was initially launched by tapping the Chief Minister's Distress Relief Fund (CMDRF) but later money was set aside in the budget. According to a government order issued by the Department of Revenue (Distress Relief Fund) dated March 31, 2020, the government released Rs 350 crore to the Department of Civil Supplies (Supplyco) from the CMDRF to launch the food kit scheme for all ration cardholders and those without ration cards. The rest of the money should be found from the budget, the government order said.
According to an RTI reply received by activist M K Haridas from Supplyco in September 2021, the state government spent Rs 4,198.29 crore to distribute food kits for 13 months from April 2020 to May 2021. Around 78.60 lakh food kits with 17 items were distributed every month. In the reply, Supplyco said the scheme was fully funded by the state government.
To be sure, the Union government footed part of the bill for rice and wheat flour distributed through ration shops but the LDF government's food kits did not have rice and wheat flour (atta).
Importantly, the food kits did not bear the name of the Chief Minister or the LDF government.
M L Ashwini also said that the Central University of Kerala missed out on getting a medical college because Kasaragod MP and Congress leader Rajmohan Unnithan did not take interest in the project. "The local MP should have taken interest in bringing the medical college. If he had followed up, it would have come much earlier. We lost it (the medical college) because of the lack of interest of our MP," she said.
According to the Central Universities Act, 2009, the Central University of Kerala has the power to start engineering and medical colleges. When the foundation stone was laid for the Central University of Kerala in January 2013, the then Union Minister for Human Resource Palam Raju and his junior Shashi Tharoor said that a medical college was part of the master plan of the university campus and it would be sanctioned on priority.
In July 2018, Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu assured an all-party delegate led by the then MP P Karunakaran that he would initiate an "all-out effort" to set up a medical college on the university campus. The state government had sanctioned 50 acres for it.
Subsequently, the Union Ministry for Education shelved its plan to set up medical colleges on Central University campuses as envisioned in the Act.
Instead, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare initiated a Centrally Sponsored Scheme to upgrade district hospitals into medical colleges under a 75:25 partnership with state governments. But Kasaragod was not considered under the scheme either though it is an "underserved" district with no medical college.
