Ahead of the announcement of the MCD polls in Delhi, BJP’s national spokesperson Sambit Patra, citing news reports and data provided by three NGOs working for labourers, on Friday claimed that the Arvind Kejriwal government has registered two lakh “fake workers” so far and have been withdrawing money against these “ghost accounts.”
“This is connected with Delhi’s labour ministry and you know who the labour minister is. There is a board called Delhi Building and Other Construction Welfare Board under the labour ministry, which registers the construction worker and takes care of their social schemes like education and health,” said Patra, addressing a press conference.
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“Since 2006, about 13 lakh workers have been registered. Between 2018 and 2021,10 lakh workers have been registered. If we are to believe these figures, 90% of the workers were registered in the last three to four years. There was a complaint which was registered by organisations and NGOs years back alleging duplicate registrations done by the AAP government and the scam runs in crores. These are proxies and ghost registrations. Money is being drawn against their names,” Patra said.
Calling it the “biggest corruption that has ever taken place in the history of India as per the construction workers in the labour ministry is concerned,” Patra claimed that according to the ongoing investigation, 65,000 out of the 2 lakh “duplicate” labourers have the same mobile numbers and 4,370 of them have the same permanent addresses, and they are “non-related.”
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“There are 15,750 construction workers who have the same residential addresses in Delhi. And they are not even related,” said Patra.
Patra began his address by taking a dig at Kejriwal over Delhi’s pollution and said that not only the air and water, but “Kejriwal’s intent is also polluted.”