New Delhi, May 8 (IANS): The Congress on Wednesday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of "event management" instead of "nation management" in the past five years, saying his much-touted Ujjawala scheme was "a failure" with the average use of gas cylinders seeing a drop.
"Narendra Modi, who behaves less like a Prime Minister and more like a Propaganda Minister, is guilty of misleading the electorate of India with hollow claims of success of his government's schemes.
"Modi's promises and claims are like a mirage, which disappear when seen with the lens of reality," Congress spokesperson Jaiveer Shergill said at a press conference here.
"The failure of flagship programme of the NDA government, the 'Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojna', launched on May 1, 2016, must serve as warning sign to the people of India that Narendra Modi cannot be and should not be trusted," he said.
Shergill claimed that the first recipient of LPG Connection from under the Ujjwala Scheme had "exposed the lies, being peddled by BJP on a daily basis".
"In an interview to a leading TV network (BBC), Guddi Devi has made shocking revelations that she still uses cow dung as fuel for cooking due to which she faces extreme hardship and that due to rising cylinder prices she cannot afford to get her cylinder refilled."
Shergill cited pictures that under the Modi government, women of the country are not "chulha-mukt but rather are getting LPG cylinder-mukt".
A CAG report notes that in 2015-16, households with LPG connections were using an average of 6.27 cylinders in a year, he said.
"But after the scheme was launched, the number of cylinders used on average had come down to 5.6. Growth in annual consumption of LPG has been on a declining trend despite the rollout of Ujjwala," he said, adding that LPG consumption saw a growth of 10.5 per cent and 9 per cent in 2014-15 and 2015-16 respectively.
Shergill said that as per a survey by a leading institution, 83 per cent recipients of the Ujjwala Yojna do not go for refills due to the high cost.
The BJP government has looted the poor and middle class by raising the LPG gas cylinder price, he alleged, noting that the price of a subsidized cylinder in Delhi on May 16, 2014 was Rs 412 and was Rs 496.14 now, while the price of non-subsidized cylinder had risen from Rs 414 to Rs 712.5 now.