A petition has been filed in the Bombay high court to scrap the bill of the Maharashtra government that increases the remuneration and pension of Legislative Assembly members.
A petition has been filed in the Bombay high court to scrap the bill of the Maharashtra government that increases the remuneration and pension of Legislative Assembly members.
Activist and former journalist Ketan Tirodkar filed the PIL in the high court. The petition said that the state’s debt burden stood at '3.79 lakh crore as on March 31 this year, the highest among all Indian states.
The state’s salary burden was increased from Rs 22,879 crore in 2007 to Rs 79,941 crore in 2016. The pension payment jumped from '4,683 crore to '24,730 crore in the same period, according to the petition.
Mr Tirodkar further said that each child born in the state would have to bear a burden of around Rs 26,000.
The petition said that the government did not have the money to give adequate pension to retired teachers and public prosecutors. On the one hand, farmers’ suicides were increasing and the state did not have money to help them but, on the other, it had enough money to increase the remuneration of the Legislative Assembly members.
Mr Tirodkar therefore demanded that the HC direct the state to scrap the bill. He demanded that the court direct the state to refrain from putting any extra burden on the state treasury hereon by way of additional benefits to people’s representatives.
The petitioner demanded that the state be directed to deposit Rs 5 crore in the Legal Aid Society of Maharashtra as a penalty for mooting such ‘atrocious bills, which only add to the existing misery of the people’.
The petition asked the court to teach a lesson to ‘state-sponsored robbers who are looting the treasury from the floor of the House’.
