At a time when leaders of the ruling Trinamul Congress have been camping in front of Raj Bhavan over non-payment of MGNREGA dues, the Union Minister of State for Finance, Pankaj Chowdhury, blamed the state for non-compliance of Central directives on the issue and said this was the actual reason behind the bottleneck.

“There’s no constraint of funds. The funds haven’t been released due to non- compliance of the Central directives on the issue,” claimed Mr Chowdhury, Union Minister of State for Finance here this afternoon.

Mr Chowdhury said: “A Central team had inspected different Bengal districts after certain complaints of misuse of funds and malpractice MINI WORLD CUP were registered. The teams also had detected some anomalies. Following their reports the Central government had sought some clarifications, as well as some actions by the state against the offenders. The state was supposed to submit the ATR (Action Taken Report) to Centre, which is still pending, causing the bottleneck.” He added: “Realisa- tion of the pilfered funds is still awaited.”

The minister came to Suboldaha village in Raina, the birthplace of freedom fight-
er Rasbehari Bose, to collect token earth as part of the BJP’s ‘Mera Desh, Mera Mitti’ polit- ical programme.

The Union Rural Development ministry last Thurs- day said that funds for West Bengal were stopped from 9 March 2022 as per the provision of Section 27 of the Mahatma Gandi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 due to the non-compliance with the Cen- tre’s directives.

The RD Ministry’s statement had come on the day the TMC had conducted a march to Raj Bhavan to protest against Centre on MGNREGA dues, incidentally. Earlier, on 3 and 4 October, the state’s ruling party had staged protests in New Delhi demanding release of funds.
Minister Chowdhury said: “Just take a look on the statistics. Between 2006-2014, Bengal had received Rs 58,000 crores and between 2014 and 2022, our government cleared Rs 2.05 lakh crore dues of Ben- gal government.”

About the PMAY (Pradhan Mantri AwasYojna) funds, Mr Chowdhury said: “Investigations revealed that names of many genuine beneficiaries were discarded and many solvent persons were accom- modated as beneficiaries. So, there’s malpractice and the funds were stopped accord- ingly.”