People’s Plan is Stalinist trap, warns UDF

No party had been left out of the campaign and participation in it transcended partisan considerations. Nobody had raised any charges of graft either at the planning board level or at the government level about the implementation of the People’s Plan, Nayanar said. Some people were trying to wreck the plan campaign, he alleged.

The People’s Plan was gettingtremendous public support. Those trying to sabotage it were compromising on the state’s developmental interests. The government was ready to rectify flaws in the campaign if point out, Nayanar claimed.

Stalinist Motives

: But it was the CPM that was subverting the state’s interests according to Antony, who alleged that almost 50 pc of last year’s plan fund, to the tune of Rs 300 crores, was hastily spent by the local bodies because of the belated sanctioning of these funds. He put the blame squarely on the government and planning board for this lapse.

He alleged that the People’s Plan, which utilised 40 per cent of the state’s budgetary allocation, was being controlled by the CPI-M through the AKG centre, its bastion.

As a result, the programme envisaging more power to villages based on the dreams of Mahatma Gandhi, had been converted into a `Stalinist method of centralisation of power’, he observed. The expert committee, consisting of Marxist followers, was taking away the power of three-tierpanchayats and was playing the role of a `super `committee’. `Such super committees should be dismissed’, he demanded.

The duo, E M Sreedharan and Thomas Issac, who controlled the whole programme connected with the People’s Plan, also held the reins of the technical committee and thus they could control the panchayats, he alleged.

He also accused the government of issuing orders to usurp the power from the panchayats and hand them over to the expert committee of the People’s Plan.

Auditing demanded

: Congress leader K Karunakaran today demanded that the Accountant General undertake a complete auditing of the People’s Plan campaign accounts. He alleged that the campaign was aimed mainly at `strengthening’ the CPI-M party. The government’s reluctance in auditing the accounts was ample proof of this, he said.