Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has alleged that the Centre is discriminating against the State government, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is making statements that are contradictory to facts.
He was opening the 75 th anniversary of the Onchiyam firing against communist revolutionaries at Onchiyam near Vadakara in Kozhikode on Sunday.
Mr. Vijayan said that Mr. Modi had attended two events in the State recently, one political event at Kochi and another official one at Thiruvananthapuram. The political stand he took at these two places were entirely different.
“What he spoke at the official event were completely true. That Kerala is a model to the country. But at the political event, what he said had nothing to do with facts or reality. He said Kerala was lagging behind in many sectors. Mr. Modi was trying to degrade Kerala, knowing fully well all the facts about the State,” Mr. Vijayan said.
When the PM was holding his political event in Kochi, the State government was conducting an event aimed at helping around 64,000 extremely poor families out of poverty in three years. That showed the LDF government’s attempts to bring them to the mainstream.
“No other State in the country is implementing such a scheme. Why the PM did not notice this?”, he said. Mr. Modi said the government had no scheme to solve the unemployment problem here. The Kerala PSC had given more jobs in Kerala than what the UPSC had done in all other States.
In 2016, when the LDF government took charge, the unemployment rate was 12%. Now it is 5%.
Mr. Modi should recall his promise of giving one crore jobs a year, Mr. Vijayan said.
The Chief Minister also alleged that the Centre was discriminating against the State on many issues. When 157 new nursing colleges were sanctioned in the country, Kerala did not get even one. When 15,700 new nursing seats were announced, nothing was given to the State. Mr. Vijayan also recalled instances such as the lack of Central nod for accepting foreign aid for flood relief works and capping the limit for borrowing.
