“As school teachers are without pay for months, Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Prem Kumar, state BJP president Mangal Pandey and I have chose to return the ovens”, the BJP’s Leader of Opposition in the Council, Sushil Kumar Modi, told The Telegraph from New Delhi.
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The Bihar government has not paid salaries to 2.5 lakh teachers after November 2015, yet the state education dept on Friday distributed microovens, suitcases & Smart phones as Holi gifts among the state’s 243 MLAs.
Earlier, each legislator used to receive dairies, watches or briefcases as token gifts every year during the Budget Session.
Sushil Modi on Twitter said it was not fair for the government to shower gifts on legislators as teachers had not been paid salaries for the last four months.
Previously, other departments have gifted costly items to legislators as a goodwill gesture.
With the matter snowballing into a major row, Deputy Chief Minister Tejaswi Yadav and his mother Rabri Devi, a former chief Minister, slammed the BJP legislators over their “belated move” to return the gifts and wondered why they accepted those in the first place. “The people who get elected in Bihar are not crorepatis but poor people. The gifts are not properly utilised by the legislators who distribute it among the party workers and other people for use”, he said. It may be recalled the Education Department had yesterday given microwave oven, costing Rs 11,225 each, to the MLAs drawing sharp criticism from various quarters.
A number of BJP legislators are also likely to return the microwave ovens, party sources said.
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They accused Modi and other BJP leaders of “playing politics” over it. Various government departments hand out such gifts to legislators in the budget session to “thank them for doing their job by raising questions in the House in public interest, which helps the government in preparing the Budget”, said an MLA, adding, “it’s been a tradition for over two decades”.
