The Naveen Patnaik government on Sunday came down heavily on the Congress-led government at the Centre saying it was behaving like a party instead of maintaining its character as a responsible constitutional authority.
Seven ministers, two Lok Sabha members and 25 MLAs, who addressed a gathering of party workers at Malkangiri protesting the Centre’s nod to the Polavaram multi-purpose dam being constructed by the Andhra Pradesh government over the Godavari, alleged that the UPA government had overlooked the threats of submergence and inundation the project was to going to cause in the Orissa side.
“The UPA government, instead of behaving like a constitutional authority, was acting like a party. In Orissa, it stalled two major projects like Posco steel plant and Vedanta alumina refinery taking the plea that they had flouted forest laws. But surprisingly, it did not look at the law while granting forest clearance to the Polavaram project which is going to submerge vast tracts of forest lands and tribal villages both in Orissa and Chhattishgarh. This forces us to think that the Union government was behaving like a party,” finance minister Prafulla Chandra Ghadei said.
The BJD, which is apparently fuming over the refusal of forest clearances to the `52,000-crore Posco and `5,000-crore Vedanta projects by the Union ministry of environment and forests (MoEF), tried to steer clear of the controversy surrounding the non-response of chief minister Naveen Patnaik to Andhra Pradesh chief minister K. Rosaiah’s letter for an amicable solution of the Polavaram issue.