Rajya Sabha today saw acrimonious exchanges between Samajwadi Party members and Power Minister Piyush Goyal over the issue of electrification of villages in Uttar Pradesh, with the former staging a walkout expressing dissatisfaction with the Minister's reply.
Chairman Hamid Ansari had to intervene several times to seek the members' cooperation in adopting restraint on the use of language and not 'monopolise' the Question Hour proceedings.
The sharp exchanges took place during Question Hour with Naresh Agrawal (SP) asking the Minister to spell out how many villages in UP were still unelectrified.
Goyal, in his written reply said 1,529 villages remained unelectrified in UP till April 1, 2015 while electrification works in 1,356 villages have been completed till July 17, 2016 and the remaining ones to be electrified before May 2018.
However, Agrawal said only 173 villages remained unelectrified as per the data, which was "wrong" and accused the Minister of defaming the state government.
To this, Goyal said the SP member was mixing up the data pertaining to electrification and intensive electrification of villages. He said the figures quoted by him are those provided by the state government itself and not of the Centre, which has accepted the data provided by the state.
The SP members expressed dissatisfaction with the Minister's reply, saying his "presentation is wrong" and staged a walkout from the House in protest.
As SP members insisted with their statement that the Minister was giving a "wrong" reply, Ansari said "You cannot do grandstanding in the House".
During the proceedings, Ansari had to intervene several times on the use of certain words by Agrawal and his colleague Neeraj Shekhar, which he termed as "unparliamentary" and asked them to refrain from using them. Goyal and Union Ministers Uma Bharti and Nitin Gadkari also strongly objected to the use of such words.
"I am compelled to draw your attention to the need to conduct Question Hour fairly so that every member gets a chance and you do not monopolise the Question Hour, otherwise you are going to be patently unfair to your own colleagues. If the answer is wrong or incomplete, then there is a procedure and you give it in writing," Ansari told the members.
Agrawal earlier accused Goyal of defaming the Uttar
Pradesh government and said "we fully condemn it. He is trying to defame the Uttar Pradesh government."
Ansari told the SP member "please refrain from making generalised statements...I will be compelled to go to the next question."
Goyal said "we have not changed the name of the electrification project. ... 1.81 crore houses are still not provided electricity as per Census by the state government. This is a serious problem and I was told by the Prime Minister to focus on this".
"As per 11th plan, Rs 4,432 crore was sanctioned for intensive electrification of 19,339 villages in Uttar Pradesh. Unfortunately, only 8,720 villages have seen intensive electrification four years after 11th Plan ended. Similarly, electricity was to be given to 8.52 lakh BPL houses in the state, but only 3.02 lakh of them have been provided power.
"In the 12th Plan, Rs 7,282 crore was sanctioned for the state for intensive electrification of 68,212 villages, but four years after the start of the Plan only 6,436 villages have been provided with power, which is only 9 per cent.
"Similarly, 32.34 lakh BPL houses were also to be provided with electricity, but the state government has provided power to only 1.23 lakh such houses of poor, which is only 4 per cent," the Minister said.
This saw SP members accusing the Minister of giving wrong data in the written answer and providing different figures in his speech now, leading to sharp exchanges.
