New Delhi. Just when the government thought that every scam was forgotten with some ‘bold’ economic steps and exit of Mamata Banerjee from the UPA, a new scam has come to light. And it appears that this scam, where billions of rupees were spent on paper to teach traffic rules to cows roaming on roads, had the support of almost every political group of India.
“A scheme named Sonia Gandhi Go Shiksha Yojna (SGGSY) has been running for over eight years and almost 8000 crores rupees of taxpayers’ money have been spent in the name of teaching traffic rules to cows,” a whistleblower blew the lid off the “CowGate” scam.
“The scheme was named after Sonia Gandhi and that good enough to involve Congress, while its pretext of helping cows was used to involve BJP,” the whistleblower, Deep Cow, revealed the pan-Indian nature of the latest scam.
“Of course, everyone knew that these nomenclature and promises were just to fool the aam aadmi supporters of the respective parties. The primary motive of coming together was to loot the taxpayers’ money,” he added.
In order to make sure that other “secular” parties didn’t object over a scheme that was primarily centered around an animal revered by Hindus, the scheme promised that cows will be trained not to park themselves randomly and obstruct roads on Fridays, a day revered by Muslims.
“Samajwadi Party and RJD got this clause, and another set of secret and personal clauses, inserted in the SGGSY scheme and gave green signal to the project,” Deep Cow told Faking News how secular parties were won over, “Such clauses made sure that if any activist or journalist wrote against fraud in the scheme, he could be termed as a communal person.”
Once the national and religious feelings were taken care of, the organizers of the SGGSY scam made sure that casteist and linguistic feelings were also taken care of.
For this, they introduced reservations in the scheme, under which only people belonging to the Backward and SC/ST classes were supposed to be hired to teach the cows the essential traffic lessons.
“Although traffic signs are mostly pictorial or color based, the scheme provisioned for distribution of traffic rules in Marathi, Tamil and other languages,” the whistleblower Deep Cow revealed how millions of rupees were spent on composing and publishing brochures for illiterate cows so that regional parties also get their share in the CowGate.
“A special training package for cows from Bihar was introduced to accommodate Nitish Kumar’s party, while a training package for bulls from Bengal to go on rampage on seeing the red (traffic) light was brought in so that Mamata Banerjee doesn’t spoil it again,” Deep Cow further revealed.
Although everything was put on paper (and it was to remain just on paper by design) to rope in different groups, parties from the North-Eastern states of India were won over just by verbal assurances, Deep Cow disclosed.
“We have come a long way from scams where money was siphoned off from genuine projects, now they make projects that are scam in themselves,” the whistleblower explained.
(originally written for and published in English daily DNA)