Gandhinagar: In an embarrassing admission, the Gujarat government on Monday told the Legislative Assembly that its officials had copied some of the pages from previous budgetary material and printed them as part of the current publication and distributed the same to Members of the House.
The Government was caught off-guard when Abdasa MLA and senior Congress leader Shaktisinh Gohil drew attention of Speaker Vaju Vala during the ongoing Assembly session about the "copy-paste" act of government in preparing budgetary material.
"I went through the material provided to us and found that 25 pages from the budgetary publications of 2013-14 have been printed 'as it is' in the current budget publication of 2014-15. Apart from some numerical information, everything
else is same in both the budget publications," alleged Gohil.
"Respected speaker, budget-related publications are very important for members. I urge you to protect us from such acts. I request you to give stern order to all those officers who take such matters lightly. I expect that such mistakes
will not happen in future," Gohil said while addressing the Speaker who in turn sought explanation from Government.
On behalf of the government, Health Minister Nitin Patel concurred with Gohil's allegation.
"The issue raised by Gohil is right. However, as soon as we learnt about it from him, we have immediately prepared a corrected version and gave it to all the members before the proceedings started today," Patel said in his reply.
However, Vala didn't appear to be fully convinced with the government's exercise and rebuked.
"You (Patel) gave a corrected copy after the matter came to your attention. That means that you committed a mistake, which compelled you to do so. But, why such mistake took place in the first place?" asked Vala while addressing Patel and
other ministers present in the House.
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