Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs and Agriculture SS Ahluwalia is a harassed man these days. Ahluwalia, a member of Lok Sabha from Darjeeling, West Bengal, recently launched an outreach to popularise the Narendra Modi government’s Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, aimed at providing cooking gas connections to poor families. Ahluwalia, during one such meeting, asked a gathering to phone him if they faced any problem in getting a connection. He even gave out his mobile phone number. Within a few days, Ahluwalia started getting calls not just from his constituents but from far flung areas of north Bengal that weren’t part of his constituency. The callers would address him as “complaint moshai”, or Mr Complaint, to tell him about gas leakage or the burner that didn’t work and sundry other issues. Ahluwalia was intrigued enough to ask a caller and was told that his number was printed as the gas complaint cell number by a local newspaper. The minister has now diverted his cell phone number to his landline and is using another number.
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