The Naveen Patnaik government has made it clear that it would not succumb to the BJP’s pressure tactics and remove the logo of former chief minister Biju Patnaik on the houses constructed under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY-Gramin).

The state’s logo will be used along with the PMAY-Gramin logo, the state government maintained.

The Opposition BJP leaders are aggrieved with the Odisha government for using Biju Babu’s photo on the PMAY-G scheme. They are of the view that with this move, the state government is trying to appropriate all the credit under the PMAY-G scheme and will effectively block BJP’s effort to garner political mileage from the Centre’s pro-poor welfare scheme.

“We are not doing any thing wrong by using our logo in this scheme. While the Centre’s share is 60 per cent in the PMAY-G scheme, the state bears a financial burden of 40 per cent,” said Panchayati Raj minister Pratap Jena.

He was responding to the BJP’s concern over the issue. The minister said, “Since the implementation of the PMAY-G, the Centre has sanctioned Rs 9900 crore and state government has allotted Rs 6600 crore. Besides we are giving incentives to those beneficiaries who complete their houses within four to six months.”

Official sources said beneficiaries who complete the house within four months of the release of the first installment are provided an incentive of Rs 20,000. It is Rs 10,000 for those who build houses in six months.

Jena said, “We have so far provided Rs 628.48 crore incentives to 3,69,515 beneficiaries. Process has begun to disburse another Rs 441 crore. If we consider these incentive amount along with the our share, Odisha’s share on the PMAY-G scheme will touch to 44 per cent and the Centre’s share will slide to 56 per cent from 60 per cent under the current funding pattern.”

Earlier, BJP MLA Mukesh Mahalinga and Bhaskar Madeshi demanded that Biju Babu’s photos should be removed, alleging that the state is trying to hijack each and every scheme of the Centre.

BJD MLAs, including Ashwini Kumar Patra, Prafulla Samal and others, said when states like Bengal, Sikkim and Tamil Nadu were using the scheme as that of state’s scheme and using photos of their respective leaders, what was wrong in the part of the Odisha government to use Biju Babu logo on the scheme.