Gorakhpur: With Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi set to pay a visit here on Saturday, state chief minister Yogi Adityanath mounted a veiled attack on him by saying that the city wasn’t a picnic spot.
“There’s a ‘yuvraj’ (prince) sitting in Delhi, who doesn’t understand the significance of a Swachhta Abhiyan. There’s no valid reason why he should be permitted to turn Gorakhpur into his picnic spot,” said the chief minister at a public meeting earlier in the day.
It may be mentioned here that Rahul is scheduled to visit Gorakhpur’s Baba Raghav Das Medical College hospital, where more than 70 children have died since August 7.
The chief minister was in Gorakhpur to flag off the ‘Swachh Uttar Pradesh, Swasth Uttar Pradesh’ campaign.
While the Adityanath-led government held Acute Encephalitis responsible for the tragic deaths, the opposition alleged that shortfall in the supply of oxygen in the hospital’s paediatric wards was the fatal factor.
Yogi Adityanath said that the present government was staking steps to transform the state and asked for the peoples participation in the sanitation campaign and making UP free of open defecation.
“I started movement against Encephalitis; when it comes to it, prevention is better than cure and it starts with sanitation,” said Adityanath.