Former Union Minister and Shiromani Akali Dal General Secretary Sukhbir Singh Badal Wednesday described Rs. 500 crore deal signed by the Punjab government with the Reliance Company Ltd. “ as the biggest real estate fraud of the century and a cruel joke on the farmers of the state who had been fed on dreams of this company transforming their destiny.”
In a statement here, Badal also asked the Chief Minster to come clean on why the size of the deal had come down from Rs. 10, 000 crores as touted by him or Rs. 5000 thousand crores as originally claimed by the Reliance. He said that the outlines of the deal appearing in the press clearly showed that the Chief Minster’s ‘mega boasts of a historic deal that could change the face of agriculture in Punjab’ were nothing but lies. He said that the seriousness of the project for the government was evident from the fact that neither the CM nor the Chairman of the Company turned up to sign what was being described by Amarinder as “a path-breaking and historic agreement”.
Badal said that the Reliance had been given a land worth Rs. 500 crores for just Rs. 40 crores and that too when the company had neither committed itself on when it would start the project or on the time scale for its completion. The Akali leader alleged that concession that could well run into fifteen hundred crores over a period of time had been given in exchange for a notional commitment of just Rs. 500 crores. He reminded that even a Fashion Technology project near Chandigarh which was housed over just eleven acres had an outlay of more than 300 crores. This showed how meaningless the deal with Reliance was considering that Amarinder had given nearly 500 acres of prime land of the state to the company.
Badal said that when the SAD formed a government in the state, it would review all anti-people and anti-Punjab deals signed by this government.
Source:http://www.punjabnewsline.com/