Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, Mar 30: Accusing the BJP-PDP coalition of administering yet another doze of hostile discrimination to Jammu region in the form of unequal share of PG seats announced for the Medical Colleges of the State, NPP chairman and former Minister Harsh Dev Singh today said that Health Minister Bali Bhagat should resign on moral grounds.
In a press statement here today, Harsh Dev Singh said that no amount of reasoning or justification provided for the differential treatment could absolve the Health Minister of such vile transgression. Seeking equal number of seats for GMC Jammu, Singh said that allocation of 57 PG seats for Kashmir based Medical Colleges as against 13 for Jammu was highly unjust, capricious and un-acceptable.
He said earlier the H&ME Minister had charged the Principal GMC Jammu for complacence and the resultant lapse but now he was coming out with altogether a different justification for the biased allocation. The new reasoning given for the uneven allocation of PG seats that it was based on Student-faculty ratio was un-acceptable as it was merely an attempt to hood-wink the people of Jammu region, Harsh Dev remarked.
The NPP leader further said that if the number of Professors and Assistant Professors was lesser in Jammu region, the remedy lay in increasing such positions rather than reducing the PG seats for the aspiring candidates of Jammu region. Asserting that Jammu region has suffered an irreparable loss, Singh said that the people could not be deluded by vague nauseating statements or by shifting the blame to individual officers. Observing that primacy of ministerial responsibility is and has got to be the lynchpin of democratic and accountable Government, Singh said that the Health Minister could not evade responsibility merely by making the GMC Principal a scape goat and sacking him.
Maintaining that political leadership was responsible for omissions and commissions in their respective Deptts, Singh said that Ministers could not display political cowardice by penning down the lapses and Deptt’s failures on selected officers. He said that when the Govt Deptts achieved excellence in some field, the impudent and self flattered Ministers patted their own backs but when lapses occurred the blame was deflected to subordinate officers. He said that the Health Minister was himself answerable to the people of Jammu region.
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