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Union minister Anurag Thakur on Wednesday said before the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, the poor across rural India did not have permanent roofs over their heads and had to relieve themselves in the open for want of toilets.
The BJP MP added that the country's rural poor did not even have bank accounts of their own before Prime Minister Narendra Modi was sworn into office. Addressing a rally at Sujanpur in the Hamirpur district poll-bound Himachal Pradesh on Wednesday, the Union minister for sports and youth affairs said, "Before 2014, the poor lived in kuchha houses, went in open for defecation and did not have bank accounts." Listing out the achievements of the Modi-led central government, especially with regard to the welfare of the country's rural poor, Thakur, who represents the Hamirpur constituency in the Lok Sabha, said the PM had pucca houses built for 3.22 crore people in Himachal Pradesh and it was under his leadership that every village in the state was electrified. The Union minister added that as part of the flagship 'Swachh Bharat' (Clean India) programme of the Union government, the prime minister had toilets built in every Himachal village to ensure that locals do not have to step outdoors to relieve themselves. He said as part of the Centre's targeted outreach towards the rural populace and ensure that they derive the desired benefits of the government's direct cash transfer schemes, bank accounts were opened. "(The PM) made toilets for every house and got bank accounts opened," the Union Sports minister said. In an earlier rally in the state on Tuesday, the Union minister claimed that the body of work of the BJP government in five years was more than what the previous Congress regimes did in 60 years. "Compare Congress's 60 years of rule to our 5 years of rule, and you'll see that our 5 years of our rule will have more weightage. They (Congress) have only stopped developments whereas we have brought developments to the state," Thakur said while addressing a public rally in the Bilaspur district of Himachal Pradesh." (ANI)
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