Sukhbir lied on investment commitment of Rs 66,000 cr: Bajwa

Punjab Congress president Partap Singh Bajwa today alleged that deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal had "lied" to the people on investment commitment of Rs 66,000 crore made by companies during the investment summit held in Mohali in December last.
In a statement here, Bajwa said information obtained by the party's RTI cell revealed that the SAD-BJP government had played a "big mischief" on the people of Punjab by lying to them on the investment commitment.
Refuting Sukhbir's claim that several companies including IT giant Infosys had signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the state, he said many of them had defined the document as "Expression of Interest (EoI)".

Infosys in the document marked as EoI had mentioned that it would make an investment of Rs 500 crore in the next 10 years if facilities were provided to them on their terms and conditions, Bajwa claimed, adding companies had signed MoUs worth only Rs Rs 31,847 crore, which is almost 50 per cent of the total investment claim of Sukhbir.
He alleged that some of the companies which had signed MoU with the government had not yet registered their firms.
Bajwa said some leading hospitals which were running specialised facilities in the periphery of Mohali and Amritsar had come up with expansion plans amounting to Rs 2,520 crore. The proposed investment Rs 4,846.99 crore in agri-food sector are mostly expansion plans of existing rice millers, he said.

Bajwa said two months have passed since the Progressive Punjab Investment Summit was held on December 9 and 10 last year, but no follow up was taken up by the state government.

He said "specific documents pertaining to complied physical progress of all these MoUs are not available in record". This clearly shows that how vague are the claims of SAD-BJP government, he said.
Bajwa said the agriculture summit which, a dream project of the Chief Minister, was another "mock exercise" which would burden the public exchequer. He questioned the rational of holding the summit when the SAD-BJP government had failed to sustain growth of agriculture in the past seven years.

More than 5,000 farmers had committed suicides and this government has not so far formulated any agriculture policy for the state, he said.