Bengaluru: Vijayswami has spent the better part of the last decade trying to get local authorities to fix a 6 km road in his native village of Rekulgi in Karnataka’s Bidar district. The absence of a road forces residents to take a 30-km detour to reach Aurad, the taluk headquarters, the sexagenarian priest told ThePrint.
“There was a road previously but it was washed away when Karanja dam overflowed in a few years ago,” Vijayswami told ThePrint Thursday.
“I have given several representations to the local authorities and even the previous MLA (former Bidar South legislator Ashok Kheny) but our problem persists.”
On Thursday, Vijayswami, who has no arms and has to open his requisition letter with his mouth, spent Rs 1,600 to travel 700 km to Bengaluru’s Vidhana Soudha, or Karnataka secretariat, hoping for an audience with Chief Minister Siddaramaiah.
And he isn’t the only one to do so. With the general election just around the corner, the state’s Congress government appears to be leaving nothing to chance, holding a “Janaspandana”, or people’s court event, at the secretariat Thursday — the second such event in six months.
Although the chief minister has been regularly holding public meetings since his government was elected last May, this particular Janaspandana was marked by its scale. While most of the other meetings were held at the chief minister’s residence and would typically last no longer than two hours, this event went on for eight hours, starting at 10 am, and saw thousands in attendance.
According to a statement issued by the Chief Minister’s Office Thursday evening, it saw 20,000 people, with the government receiving around 11,000 applications by the end of it.
“Concerned DCs will dispose of applications in a time-bound manner. District-in-charge secretaries have been instructed to resolve applications pertaining to their districts,” the statement said, adding that officials have been instructed to dispose of or resolve these issues within a month.
Like Vijayswami, several of those ThePrint spoke to said they had come to Janaspandana after their requests were ignored by their local administration. At the event too, several complained about being made to “run around” to submit their applications.
Meanwhile, the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) asked the government to “pay attention” to governance issues. Significantly, the BJP won 25 of the state’s 28 parliamentary seats in the 2019 general election while the Congress could manage only one.
“Mr Siddaramaiah, don’t pat yourself on the back that many people have joined the Janaspandana,” BJP’s long post said in Kannada. “Among the people who have gathered, the majority of the people who have gathered have expressed their displeasure at the mismanagement of your government.”
“ಜನಸ್ಪಂದನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಜನರಿಗೆ ಸ್ಪಂದನೆಯೂ ಇಲ್ಲ – ಗೌರವವೂ ಇಲ್ಲ”
ಜನಸ್ಪಂದನೆ ಹೆಸರಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಪೊಲಿಟಿಕಲ್ ಸ್ಟಂಟ್ನಲ್ಲಿ ನಿರತವಾಗಿರುವ ಸಿಎಂ @siddaramaiah ಅವರಿಗೆ , ನೆರೆದಿರುವ ಜನರೇ ಸರ್ಕಾರದ ದುರಾಡಳಿತದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಛೀಮಾರಿ ಹಾಕುತ್ತಿದ್ದಾರೆ.
“ಗೃಹಲಕ್ಷ್ಮಿಯ ಒಂದು ಪೈಸೆ ಸಹ ಬಂದಿಲ್ಲ, ಗೃಹಜ್ಯೋತಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಬೇಕಾಬಿಟ್ಟಿ ಬಿಲ್ ಬರುತ್ತಿದೆ,… pic.twitter.com/kdFYUpIlFS
— BJP Karnataka (@BJP4Karnataka) February 8, 2024
ThePrint reached the CMO via calls and text for comment on the BJP’s allegations but had not received a response by the time of publication. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
Also Read: From atheist to agnostic to ‘believer’ — how Siddaramaiah’s spiritual journey has come full circle
‘Ignored’ requests ignored, ‘rampant’ corruption
At Thursday’s event, 42-year-old homemaker Shabana was desperately looking for someone to help her write a memo to the chief minister. It’s been nearly eight months since she and her older relative, Nazia Begum, registered for the Congress government’s monetary benefit scheme, ‘Gruha Laksmi’, but she is yet to receive any financial assistance.
Announced by the Congress government before the assembly election last May and launched in August, the ‘Gruha Laksmi’ scheme promises financial assistance of Rs 2,000 to women heads of low-income families.
“I duly registered for the scheme when it was announced and even have the acknowledgment but have not received any money since then. I was hoping that meeting the CM would give us some relief,” Shabana told ThePrint.
Several people at Thursday’s event complained of rampant corruption in government channels. Among them was Pattaraju, the son of a freedom fighter and a farmer from Channarayapatna in Hassan district, who travelled three hours for the event to seek compensation for four acres of land he said the government had taken away.
“When I went to the district administration, they asked me to go looking for an empty land. (Meanwhile) the tehsildar has said that he would look into the issue only if I have Rs 2-3 lakh (as bribe money). Where should I get this money from? This is injustice and they give us false assurances here (at the event),” he told ThePrint.
In an interview with NDTV Thursday, Karnataka’s Minister for Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Priyank Kharge said CM Siddaramaiah and Deputy CM D.K. Shivakumar “are of the strong opinion that governance should be delivered to their (voters’) doorstep”.
“In the last six months the CM has done (held) two Janaspandanas and every minister at the district level has done more than three,” he said.
People come to the event because they believe work gets done faster when they make their requests directly to the CM, Kharge said. “It’s not that departments are not working or the ministers are not working. We do it at the district level and the taluk level,” he said.
“It’s just the expectation of the people that they come to Vidhana Soudha and get their work done. They think it happens more quickly.”
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)