Subsidies will burden taxpayer,move will benefit few people,says Jaitley

Jaitley said the poorest and weakest sections of the capital had not been included in the free water scheme announced by the AAP. “Localities without pipelines,households without taps,households without meters and households with defective meters are not entitled to any subsidy. Households in the NDMC area,particularly of those employees who draw very low salaries and households in Delhi Cantonment have all been kept out of the free water scheme. This subsidy ignores the weakest and includes a small layer of people with metered consumption,” he said.

Jaitley said the move will benefit only a few households. “Subsidies make the health of the supply organisations vulnerable. The real challenge is that those outside the water supply system must be connected to it. Laying down pipelines in every locality or installation of taps in every house can only be provided by a healthy board and not a financially vulnerable DJB,” he said.

Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said,“As far as water is concerned,like any responsible government,we have said that it is ‘lifeline water’ which we will provide to people. Just because poor people cannot pay for water doesn’t mean that they won’t drink water… Someone can only argue on the amount of ‘lifeline water’ that needs to be provided — should it be 500 litres or 700 litres? As far as power consumption is concerned,during our election campaign we noticed that a lot of poor and middle-class people were finding it almost impossible to pay their bills. It is the responsibility of the government to look into this. It is not a populist move.”