No Lokayukt, no human rights panel chief in Jharkhand
Ranchi, August 1: The BJP-AJSU government in Jharkhand has left thousands of complainants in the lurch by keeping the posts of Lokayukt and the chief of the State Human Rights Commission vacant for several months, said opposition parties.
"The government boasts it is fighting corruption while keeping the Lokayukt post vacant. It's a government that's only serving big industrialists and has left people to fend for themselves," Alok Dubey, Jharkhand state Congress General Secretary, said.
The Lokayukt post has been lying vacant since Justice Amreshwar Sahay completed his term four months ago.
Till
Sahay
was
in
the
saddle,
people
were
able
to
register
their
complaints.
No
longer.
The
opposition
parties
allege
that
keeping
the
post
vacant
is
a
deliberate
ploy
of
the
Raghubar
Das
government
to
avoid
accountability
for
the
cases
of
corruption
within
its
ranks.
Nor is the government interested in ending the long-term neglect of Lokayukta which needs more power and infrastructure to act effectively on complaints of corruption, said the opposition parties Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), the Congress, and the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha-Prajantrik (JVM-P).
The situation is the same at the state Human Rights Commission (SHRC), which is headless since January 2016 when the tenure of Narayan Rai came to an end.
The
entire
process
of
registering
of
complaints
and
acting
on
them
has
since
been
adversely
affected.
At
both
the
Lokayukta
and
the
SHRC,
people
are
either
not
able
to
file
their
complaints
or
feel
that
there
has
been
no
action
on
their
complaints.
Complaints cannot be forwarded also because there is no chairman to sign the covering letter, said a source in the SHRC where about 650 cases are pending.
Public funds continue to be spent on an SHRC that has been virtually dysfunctional. Its staff received Rs 17 lakh in salaries in the current financial year so far from the state government, the source said.
IANS