Ludhiana: In a shocking revelation, it has come to light that a minister in Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-ruled Punjab ran a non-existent department for nearly two years!
State Minister Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal headed the Department of Administrative Reforms, which was “not in existence” for 20 months.
The Punjab government, headed by Bhagwant Mann, finally scrapped the department as part of a major administrative shake-up, which saw the transfer of 21 IPS officers.
A gazette notification, issued on Friday by Punjab Chief Secretary K A P Sinha on Friday, stated that the decision to scrap the department came on the advice of CM Mann.
“The Department of Administrative Reforms earlier allotted to Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal, Cabinet Minister, is not in existence as of date,” the notification said. It clarified that Dhaliwal will retain only the NRI Affairs portfolio as of date.
The AAP government, left red-faced, took corrective action soon after realising that the department did not exist despite Dhaliwal being allocated to head it.
Dhaliwal tried his best to hide embarrassment by downplaying the controversy.
“You would have read in paper that the department has ceased to exist. We are here to do service. We are here to save Punjab and not get department. This is not an agenda for us,” he said.
The chief minister blamed previous governments for the formation of the Department of Administrative Reforms and claimed a proper system has been put in place now.
“We have one department in the government and one in the bureaucracy. There is one under Aman Arora,” he said.
BJP wasted no time in slamming the AAP government in Punjab, dubbing the move as ‘Kejriwal Model’.
“Punjab had a Minister for Administrative Reforms but no Ministry of Administrative Reforms. The AAP government headed by Bhagwant Mann was blissfully unaware of this till it erased the tag of Minister for Administrative Reforms. This is Kejriwal Model,” Kanchan Gupta, a senior advisor to the Union Ministry of Information & Broadcast, posted on X.
BJP’s IT cell head Amit Malviya said AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal is “a charlatan who must be banished from public life”.
“You can imagine the crisis in the Punjab government if it took nearly 20 months to realise that a department assigned to one of its prominent ministers never actually existed,” Malviya tweeted.
Akali Dal leader Harsimrat Kaur Badal claimed that such things were happening in Punjab as it was being run by a “remote control in Delhi.”
