Rs six crore pending as electricity, water dues on MPs

 Over Rs six crore in bills are pending as electricity and water charges on serving and former parliamentarians, some of them even dead, with the maximum of Rs 42 lakh pending on former Congress MP late A B A Ghani Khan Chaudhury, an RTI reply has revealed.

The reply from New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) has over 3,335 entries of pending water and electricity dues against MPs which total to over Rs 6.27 crore.

The list includes present and former members of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha with some prominent leaders like former Prime Ministers Chaudhary Charan Singh and P V Narsimha Rao, former ministers Rajesh Pilot, Sunil Dutt and stalwarts like Janeshwar Mishra, Chaturanan Mishra and Chaudhury among others who are no more.

Chaudhury's name had also figured with the highest dues towards phone bills of over Rs 34 lakh.
The information provided to RTI activist Subhash Agrawal by NDMC also has names of former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda, senior BJP leader L K Advani, former Rajya Sabha member Subramanian Swamy's in the list of pending dues.

During the hearing of a PIL on the issue, the Lok Sabha Secretariat had informed the Delhi High Court in 2008 that dues from an MP are recovered by deducting amounts from their salary and pension.

But, it had added, in several case the dues are huge and it would take long time to recover the entire amount.

State-run telecom company MTNL had also pointed out that it was facing difficulty in recovering dues from MPs and former lawmakers as they tend to file petitions in different parts of the country against the recovery process.