Whose Money Is It Anyway!

Of the Rs 60.45 crore allocated for construction of roads and bridges, the state government gave only Rs 30 crore

Another Rs 52.64 crore was allocated, of which the government again spent only Rs 3 crore

On the other hand, the state allocated only Rs 5 crore against the Rs 42.92 crore proposed by the Planning Commission for immediate relief operations

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Exactly a year after a 6.9 magnitude temblor hit Sikkim on September 18, 2011, the mountain state was hit by another rude tectonic jolt, its 5.55 pm timing just 15 minutes off the original earthquake at 6.10 pm. It is the second anniversary of the 2011 tragedy, and a third shock awaits Sikkim’s people: the fact of the Pawan Kumar Chamling government—in power in the state since 1994—misutilising the funds it received from various agencies to rebuild public inf­rastructure that had been damaged in the 2011 quake and the accompanying landslides. This included financial...