Karnataka govt to form panels to oversee implementation of poll guarantees: Siddaramaiah

PTI, Jan 10, 2024, 6:35 PM IST

Source: PTI / File

Bengaluru: Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Wednesday said that the government will constitute committees at the state, district and constituency level to supervise the implementation of the five guarantees promised by the Congress during 2023 assembly polls.

Those heading the panels will get an honorarium, Siddaramaiah told reporters at a press conference here.

”Today I (Siddaramiah), Congress general secretary (Karnataka in charge) Randeep Singh Surjewala, Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar and other ministers have taken an important decision to constitute committees for the implementation of the five guarantees. There will be state, district and constituency level panels,” he said.

The chief minister said the state level committee would have a president and five vice presidents.

”The state level president will be given Cabinet rank and the vice president, state minister rank. They will supervise the implementation of the scheme. The committee will have 31 members,” Siddaramaiah said.

Every committee at the district level will have 21 members and a vice president, and will be headed by a president who will get an honorarium of Rs 50,000, he said.

The constituency level committee will have a chairperson, a vice president and 11 members.

”For constituency level chairperson, we have not decided whether to give Rs 20,000 or Rs 25,000. But he or she will get an honorarium. Members will only get a sitting fee. We are going to constitute these committees within a week,” the chief minister said.

According to him, these committees will start functioning immediately after they are formed.

Speaking about the financial implication of the five guarantees of the Congress government in Karnataka, Siddaramaiah said it will cost the exchequer Rs 38,000 crore in the current financial year (2023-24). In the next year, Rs 58,000 crore to Rs 59,000 crore will be spent, he added.

”These are not small programmes. The most important aspect is that the benefit directly reaches the beneficiaries without any middlemen. Every month, 1.20 crore families will get about Rs 4,000-Rs 5,000. This is called universal basic income for the unprivileged communities. A total of 4.3 crore families are going to benefit from these five guarantees,” Siddaramaiah said.

He said that the four guarantees, which are ‘Shakti’- offering free rides to Karnataka women in non-luxury government buses, ‘Anna Bhagya’- offering 10 kg food grains, ‘Gruha Jyoti’- promising 200 units of free power to every household and ‘Gruha Lakshmi’- offering Rs 2,000 to women head of the family, have been implemented.

The fifth one, ‘Yuva Nidhi’, will be launched on January 12 on the birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda.

While asserting that the Congress implemented its key poll promises, Siddaramaiah took a dig at the BJP, which he said could not fulfill even 10 per cent of the promises made in 2018.

”Today the BJP is showing concern for farmers and met the Governor. They had promised to waive off loans in cooperative and nationalised banks. Did they do it? What moral right do they have to question us,” he asked.

Alleging that the previous BJP government could not waive off even a single rupee, Siddaramaiah recalled that when there was a drought in the state in 2009, the then chief minister B S Yediyurappa backtracked on the loan waiver.

”When the (then) leader of the opposition in the legislative council, V S Ugrappa, asked for a loan waiver, Yediyurappa replied, ‘I had said something that time. Can it (loan waiver) be implemented? Do I have a note printing machine?’ This he spoke on record in the Legislative Council on December 9, 2009,” Siddaramaiah claimed.

He said that BJP state president B Y Vijayendra was not aware of what his father Yediyurappa had spoken on record in the council.