The 10 Kuki-Zo MLAs in Manipur have urged the Centre to make interim arrangements for direct financing of development projects in the districts predominantly inhabited by the community.
They said this arrangement should be in place “pending final separation through a political settlement” as the state government “has frozen all funds flow” to these districts.
The demand was made in a two-page memorandum to Prime Minister Narendra Modi after a silent sit-in by the 10 legislators at the Jantar Mantar in Delhi on Tuesday.
The MLAs — seven from the ruling BJP, two from the KPA and one Independent — were the first to raise the demand for a separate administration for the Kuki-Zos in Guwahati on May 12 last year.
Vungzagin Valte, the BJP MLA from Thanlon who was brutally assaulted by a mob in Meitei-majority Imphal on May 4, attended the sit-in in a wheelchair. He is yet to recover from the injuries.
In their signed memorandum to Modi, the legislators said that since the “communalised state government had deprived our people of all development funds, we urge the central government to kindly make interim planning mechanism and budgetary arrangements to fund the much-needed development projects in the districts predominantly inhabited by our people, pending final separation through a political settlement”.
They urged the Centre to “kindly consider routing funds for development projects for critical sectors like healthcare, education, roads and water supply, directly to the district authorities based on the recommendations of elected representatives from such districts”.
The reasons for seeking direct funding included the state’s “failure” to recommend and its move to deliberately leave out the affected hill districts while disbursing funds under PM-DevINE, which seeks to “provide super-speciality and assured speciality health carein remote and hill districts (infrastructure and equipment) in Manipur amounting to ₹10,466.11 lakh”.
It cited how not a single road in the hill districts “figured” in the list of the “recently approved construction of 57 roads in Manipur for which ₹201.5 crore has been sanctioned”.
