Former Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot strongly reacted to the reference to the stalling of the refinery work during the previous Congress regime (2018 -2023) made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a public meeting in Pachpadra on Saturday.
While inaugurating the HPCL – Rajasthan Oil Refinery, the first Greenfield petro-Chemical plant of the country yesterday, PM Modi accused the then Gehlot-led government of non-cooperation and delaying the project. “The MoU of the refinery was signed in 2017. However, after the Congress government came to power in Rajasthan in 2018, it did not cooperate, and work on this ultra-mega project was stalled during their regime,” he said.
“After the double-engine government of the BJP assumed office in the in December 2023, the work on the project was expedited, leading to its inauguration,” Modi pointed out.
However, contradicting the Prime Minister last evening itself, the senior Congress leader Gehlot shared a post on the social media platform “X”. He contended that most of the work on the project was completed under the previous regime, even the Modi government had accepted it on record. He recalled that on August 1, 2024, the Modi government foncirmed in the Lok Sabha in written reply to a question from Barmer MP Ummeda Ram Beniwal that 80.8 per cent of the targeted construction work has been completed.
“Our Congress government was in the office until December 2023, this work was completed during our tenure in office”, he wrote.
“Had the BJP government, that could not accomplish the routine road repair task in two and a half years, completed the 80.8 per cent of the refinery work by some magic in 6 months,” Gehlot quipped sarcastically.
“The ground reality is different, our previous government did not let suspension/closure of work even for a single day. Not even in the critical phase of COVID19 and the related lock downs, when availability of labourers workers was a constraint,” the three-time CM clarified.
he said the Prime Minister’s statement about stalling of the work is an insult of thousands of those engineers and workers who toiled day and night for the project.
Some credit hungry people must have given wrong briefing to Prime Minister Modi for making the above statement, stern action must be taken against such people for misleading the PM, Gehlot added.