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| Jora at loggerheads with JKAACL | | Academy ignoring cultural minister, approaching CM directly | | Syed Junaid Hashmi
ET Report
JAMMU, Feb 26: Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages has swimmingly become a bone of contention between Chief Minister's office and Minister for Culture with both puling in opposite directions.
Sources said that attitude and behaviour of officials of JKAACL has made the matters worse. They added that while the academy has been facing acute shortage of funds, those manning the academy are in breach of the rules and regulations bypassing Minister for Culture and directly communicating with Chief Minister's office.
Sources maintained that while the culture Minister is Nawang Rigzin Jora, Academy has been ignoring him completely and sending all the official communications to Chief Minister Omar Abdullah who by virtue of the constitution of the Academy has both administrative and financial powers.
Jora is purportedly annoyed at Academy officially approaching Chief Minister for all works pertaining to JKAACL in complete breach of power vested to him as cultural minister. Sources affirmed that Jora has been repeatedly asking Academy officials to approach him since he is cultural minister but they are ignoring the same deliberately.
They said that irked at the repeated disobedience of his orders, cultural minister has outrightly refused to release funds to the academy. More ironical is the fact that Chief Minister's office is also paying no heed to Cultural Minister's repeated requests of clarifying his status vis-à-vis the functioning of cultural academy, added the sources.
Further, cultural minister is in a fix over the jurisdiction which he has as Cultural minister. "Mr. Jora is Cabinet Minister for Culture. Academy which is an essential centre for the development of culture should normally come under its purview and the same should have been made known to the officials manning cultural academy," said a close aide of Minister for Culture Nawang Rigzin Jora.
He further said "If the constitution debars Cultural minister from looking after the affairs of JKAACL, either the constitution of academy should have been amended before creation of cultural ministry or the ministry should not have been created at all," added the aide. He stressed that while the academy officials approach the minister for funds, they prefer not to even intimate him about creation of posts and other vitally important administrative issues of the academy.
The aide did not mince words while saying that Chief Minister should discourage the officials manning JKAACL from approaching him directly. "They should take the files directly if they want the cultural ministry to function. Otherwise, better would be to wind up the ministry at the earliest," added another close aide of Jora.
Meanwhile, the academy officials have been repeatedly raising hue and cry over the inordinate and avoidable delay in release of the grant-in-aid to the academy. "Academy provides nominal grant-in-aid to 400 non-governmental organizations working in the areas of language, literature, culture and art. If there is delay in releasing this, it would have serious impact on the functioning of these NGOs," said an official of Academy.
He added that Academy is following the constitution and can in no way violate it for any reason. "If there is confusion, government should clear it. We are not empowered to do so," added the official. |
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