Tejashwi Yadav: 'Nitish responsible for Patna floods, not engineers'

Prolonged waterlogging in Patna for 10 days has receded and now the Bihar Govt has realised that it was not only natural calamity and incessant rainfall but also the lapses on part of the officials, engineers, and administration of urban department that led to the floods in Patna. The Bihar Government has formed a four-member committee of senior IAS officers Arun Singh, Pratyayay Amrit, S Siddhartha, and Amrit Lal Meena to enquire into the lapses and slackness of the urban department.

Nitish Kumar transferred senior IAS officer

In the process, Bihar CM Nitish Kumar also took action and transferred senior IAS officer and principal secretary of urban department Chaitanya Prasad and IAS officer and MD of BUIDCO Amrendra Singh and issued a show-cause notice to 44 engineers and suspended six sanitary inspectors. 

'Nitish Kumar caught napping'

However, the leader of opposition Tejaswi Yadav feels that this is an eyewash by Nitish Kumar as he has failed to keep Patna clean. He said, "Nitish Kumar takes the credit of all the work, and for failures, he holds employees and engineers responsible. Earlier, Nitish Kumar had said that the waterlogging was due to natural calamity, than why has CM issued a show-cause notice to 22 engineers, 20 sanitary inspectors. It means now the CM agrees that there were administrative lapses and it seems that only these engineers and officers were accountable and not the CM and his Urban Minister Suresh Sharma. Nitish Kumar is the Chief Minister for the past 14 years and he has been caught napping this time and also in what capacity, the Deputy CM Sushil Modi reviewed the functioning of the urban department, is he not responsible?" 

JDU hits back at Tejashwi

Replying to Tejashwi's attack on Nitish Kumar, JDU Spokesperson Sanjay Singh said, "Has Tejashwi forgotten the 15 years of jungle raj of Lalu Yadav and Rabri Devi, when the government was run on gunpoint. Fodder scam happened and Tejashwi Yadav is also charge-sheeted along with his father in IRCTC scam. If at all Tejashwi believed in democracy, he would not have skipped the monsoon session of the Bihar Assembly. He, being the leader of the opposition, never visited the flood-affected areas of Patna. Earlier also, he did not even care to visit the children suffering from encephalitis, instead, he was enjoying outside Patna. He is not a serious politician."

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As the four days of continuous rainfall broke the records of 102 years and Patna witnessed 220-300 mm unprecedented rainfall during this period, it also exposed the failure of the Nitish Kumar-led government as far as drainage and urban infrastructure of Patna is concerned. Tejashwi may have rightly pointed out that Nitish Kumar should also take the onus, but as leader of the opposition, Tejashwi did not care to be with the distressed people of Patna a single day, when the entire city was submerged. Instead, he was in Haryana participating in the nomination filing of his brother in law. Tejashwi's adversary Pappu Yadav earned accolades from the Patnaites for the help he rendered during the crisis.

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