mumbai

Updated: Mar 29, 2018 01:12 IST

President of Mumbai’s Congress unit Sanjay Nirupam has claimed that an average of 18,591 cups of tea is served in the Maharashtra Chief Minister’s (CM) office daily, amounting to a cost of over Rs3.4 crore in the year 2017-18.

In what is being labelled a ‘tea scam’, Nirupam has alleged a 577 per cent increase in the money spent on the tea served at the CM’s office from 2015-16 to 2017-18.

Providing the relevant right to information (RTI) documents, Nirupam alleged that the amount spent on tea has risen from nearly Rs58 lakhs in 2015-16 and Rs1.2 crore in 2016-17 to Rs3.4 crores in 2017-18.

He said, “All these years, I have heard of green tea and yellow tea, but this seems to be some kind of golden tea. How much and what kind of tea is Devendra Fadnavis drinking? When farmers are dying in Maharashtra, the expense on tea in this government is unprecedented.”

Nirupam went on to take a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well.

Alleging corruption in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, Nirupam said, “The Prime Minister takes pride in saying that he was a ‘chaiwala’ (tea seller). Devendra Fadnavis has taken this a bit too far since the tea he is drinking cannot be sold at a regular tea stall.”

Last week, a rat scam rattled the Maharashtra government, when the opposition accused it of inflating figures of rat killings. On Thursday, former revenue minister and senior BJP leader Eknath Khadse, ad alleged a scam over the claim that an agency appointed to kill rats at the Mantralaya killed 3.19 lakh rats at the headquarters in one week.