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| Jora apologetic on poor performance of Tourism Department | | Officials' inaction creates way for allotment of model villages to NGO | |
EARLY TIMES REPORT
JAMMU, Mar 25: Minister of Tourism, Nawang Rigzin Jora, today tendered his apologies on the poor performance of his department in the development of 50 model tourist villages in the Legislative Assembly and assured the House that work would be soon allotted to a non-governmental organization.
While responding to the complaint of National Panthers Party MLA, Harsh Dev Singh, Rigzin Jora admitted during the discussion on grants for his department in the Legislative Assembly today that in continuity to the previous regime, National Conference-led coalition government had failed to develop 50 model tourist villages in the last 15 months. Harsh Dev Singh complained that successive governments had failed to utilize an amount of Rs 35 Crore that had been sanctioned by Prime Minister and released to the state in 2004.
Singh complained that every year since 2004, state government had given identical reply to related questions in the Legislative Assembly and doled out assurance of developing the model tourist villages. However, no such assurance, according to him, had been ever honoured. Addressing Minister of Tourism through Speaker, Harsh Dev asserted that it this inaction on the Centrally sponsored project was going to continue, he and his party's would not take the trouble of asking any more questions on the subject. He said that he had a particular reason to ask such questions as two of the proposed villages were situated in his constituency.
"I have no hesitation to admit that my department has not performed well on the villages. Admittedly, there has been poor performance and shortcomings. One of the reasons is that the NGOs selected did not cooperate with us. Now we have decided to get the partnership with INTAC. We have submitted the project to the Centre and we are getting it approved as quickly as possible", Jora said.
During Mr Ghulam Nabi Azad's tenure as Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir, then Minister of Power Jora's colleague and then Minister of Tourism, Mohammad Dilawar Mir, had engaged a European woman as consultant for this project who was paid huge amount of amount as "remuneration". However, rather than providing any consultancy, the woman engaged on the recommendation of PDP top brass spent years of her stay in Kashmir in writing pro-Azadi articles in local newspapers and also ran an aggressive election campaign in favour of Dilawar Mir.
Nevertheless, for the first time in his four-decade-long political career, Mir lost to his former PDP colleague, Javed Ahmed Dar, who contested for National Conference.
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