Day after they spar,PM calls up Nitish,promises to ‘relook’ Kosi relief funds

“The Prime Minister called and assured that he will relook into the whole issue,” Nitish Kumar told The Indian Express,maintaining that nothing other than Kosi was discussed during the five-minute telephone talk which had earlier triggered fresh speculation in Delhi and Patna.

In JD(U) circles,the Prime Minister’s phone call was viewed as “vindication” of the Chief Minister’s stand as it came a day after Singh criticised Kumar for making “false” and “misleading” allegations on the Central demand for return of relief money. “The fault of not spending the money is with the state and not with the Centre,” Singh told a press conference in Ludhiana on Monday. Kumar,who hit back at the PM for questioning his secular credentials,said the row over the Kosi money was an “injustice” to Bihar and its people,still reeling from the havoc caused by the flood.

The controversy over relief money began after a letter dated April 27 from the Disaster Management division of the Ministry of Home Affairs sought recovery of Rs 1,000 crore ad hoc grant made to Bihar to battle the Kosi floods. Pointing to norms and guidelines for expenditure and opening balance of the state’s Calamity Relief Fund (CRF) as cited by the State Accountant General,the letter concluded that the “net outgo from the NCCF (National Calamity and Contingency Fund) will be Nil and the entire amount of Rs 1,000 crore released from NCCF on an on-account basis is required to be recovered.”

The Bihar government made it public,accusing the Centre of doing “injustice” to the state. The state government claimed that a scrutiny showed that the state Accountant General’s office had erroneously reported the “opening balance” figures of the CRF as on April 1,2008. Bihar Chief Secretary R J M Pillai wrote to the Centre,clarifying that the state government’s CRF balance on 1 April 2008 was minus Rs 820 crore,not Rs 906.24 crore as “wrongly” worked out by the State AG office.

After the Chief Secretary’s letter reached New Delhi,the Prime Minister telephoned the Chief Minister and assured a “relook” into the matter. Bihar Deputy Chief Minister and Finance Minister Sushil Kumar Modi said that the Chief Secretary,in his letter to the Cabinet Secretary,had made it clear that the local AG office had done “erroneous accounting”,resulting in the confusion over the CRF opening balance. “Now that the Prime Minister has called the Chief Minister,we are sure that the confusion on figures will be over,” Modi told The Indian Express.