By asking panchayats to pay pending school power bills, government is running away from its responsibly: Aman Arora

Chandigarh, March 6 : Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) senior leader and Sunam MLA Aman Arora has described the recent orders purported to have been issued by the education department mandating that the power connections would henceforth be issued in the name of respective Panchayat. It also said that the pending bills would also be borne by the panchayats, stating that by doing so, the government was running away from the responsibility,

Arora informed that the government had not allocated any funds for paying off the electricity bills of government schools in the state and that the school managements had to meet the expenditure through their own meager funds. And, now, passing the responsibility over to the panchayats, Arora said, the move would have a bearing on the functioning of the panchayats as they were already battling financial crunch.

Arora said the education department had to perform academic jobs while the panchayats had an entirely different role to play. Clubbing both the departments would, surely than not, hamper the assigned work, besides leading to audit objections, when the panchayats would be required to dispose of the bills of government schools. He demanded that the government should wave off the pending bills to ensure regular power supply to schools.