Lashing out at the centre in series of tweets, Chidambaram said that more and more people are running out of cash and standing in ques to get the cooked food.
New Delhi| Former Finance Minister and senior Congress leader P. Chidambaram today accused the central government of failing to protect the dignity of the poor who have been left jobless and hungry because of the lockdown imposed by the government to curb the spread of coronavirus.
Lashing out at the centre in series of tweets, Chidambaram said that more and more people are running out of cash and standing in ques to get the cooked food. He urged the government to transfer cash and distribute free foodgrains to the poor, taunting that only a “heartless government” will not do anything.
“There is overwhelming evidence that more and more people have run out of cash and are forced to stand in lines to collect free cooked food. Only a heartless government will stand by and do nothing,” Chidambaram said.
Chidamabaram tweeting two “economic and moral” questions in the morning, tagged PM Modi and FM Nirmala Sitharaman and said the government has failed to answer these two questions.
In the first question, while he targeted the centre’s inability to make direct cash transfers to poor, in the second question he accused the government of not utilizing
the food grains in godowns of Food Corporation of India (FCI) to distribute and feed the poor.
“Why cannot government save them from hunger AND protect their dignity by transferring cash to every poor family? Why can’t government distribute, free of cost, a small part of the 77 million tonnes of grain with FCI to families who need the grain to feed themselves?” Chidamabaram asked on his twitter handle.
Why cannot government save them from hunger AND protect their dignity by transferring cash to every poor family?
Why can’t government distribute, free of cost, a small part of the 77 million tonnes of grain with FCI to families who need the grain to feed themselves?
— P. Chidambaram (@PChidambaram_IN) April 19, 2020
Many states have thousands of migrant workers from other states in their cities and it’s proven to be extremely difficult to manage the food, shelter and health benefits for them since they were rendered jobless after the lockdown was imposed.
P. Chidambaram has been thoroughly critical of the central government’s handling of Covid-19. “Cry, my beloved country,” he had tweeted on the day PM Modi announced the extension of lockdown till 3 May.
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