Discretionary Quota: Congress accuses Odisha govt of trying to shield corrupt officials

A day after the state cabinet decided to exclude single allottees under the discretionary quotas from the purview of the Tara Dutt taskforce report, Congress on Saturday condemned the Odisha government over the same.

Lashing out at the ruling BJD, senior Congress leader Jayadev Jena alleged, “The state government has taken this decision to protect bureaucrats, especially the IAS and the IPS officers because if the bureaucrats land in problem, they will create problems for the government.”

“There is no meaning in forming Task Force. The government had formed Task Force to deal with corruption cases. Now the government threw it into the dustbin. This proved that the BJD government knows how to shield corrupt officials and not to take action against them,” he further said.

Responding to the allegations, BJD MLA Rajkishore Das said, “Opposition knows only to oppose whatever the government does. They never get into reality. When they were in power, they also used the discretionary quota for getting houses. Those who have been debarred, also have equal rights to get houses. So, I think the government has taken the right decision. It will help give justice to the deserving people.”

It is pertinent to note that almost eight years after the BJD government announced cancellation of nearly 1,800 allotments of houses and plots in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack under the discretionary quota, the same government later rolled back some of its decisions excluding some discretionary quota allotments from the purview of a task force report into the 2014 scam.