With the Union Government denying if Punjab government has sent a proposal for the return of corpus accumulated under National Pension Scheme (NPS), the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on Monday said the Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann has cheated state government employees on the issue of the restoration of Old Pension Scheme (OPS).
In a statement here, former minister Dr Daljit Singh Cheema said that Chief Minister Mann should explain why he had cheated the government employees by issuing a notification to implement the OPS in the Punjab when the state had not even asked the central government to return the accumulated corpus of subscribers under the NPS back to it.
Dr Cheema said the AAP government was exposed in Parliament today when it came to light that it had not made a request to the Centre and the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority to return the corpus of its subscribers back to the state so that it could use the same to fund the Old Pension Scheme.
“Only three states – Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand have made such a request, making it clear that the AAP government indulged in a sham exercise by issuing a notification to implement the Old Pension Scheme on the eve of elections to Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, to befool government employees,” he said.
The SAD leader said that this proves beyond doubt that the AAP government and CM Bhagwant Mann did not have any intention of implementing the scheme and was only playing politics on this issue. “This is condemnable and amounts to betraying lakhs of pensioners as well as government employees,” he added.
Dr Cheema also asked the AAP government to come out with a plan to implement the Old Pension Scheme as promised and not to get into a blame game with the Central government on this issue.
“You (AAP) made this promise to Punjabis. You should have made the necessary calculations to generate the funds needed to implement this scheme. You cannot pass on the buck to the centre,” he said.