Yogi Adityanath: ‘Citizens can question government but can’t take law into their hands’
UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath spoke on four years of his government, the second wave of Covid-19, and the use of the National Security Act (NSA) in the state.
On the roadmap for Uttar Pradesh Uttar Pradesh is the largest state by the country’s population, so naturally, our challenges are big as well. We have been facing those daunting challenges with robustness and today, the results are in front of us. Everyone saw the state that we had inherited. About four-and-a-half years ago, what assumptions the country and the world had about UP, I don’t think that’s hidden from any of you. But I’m sure that those assumptions about the state have changed now. If someone has not been influenced beforehand, he/she will have a favourable opinion about UP. It has accumulated a lot of positive things in the meantime. In 2016, it ranked 16th on the ‘ease of doing business’ list. Today it’s at No. 2. The state’s economy was 6th in the country. If someone was visiting our state, we had to say that we are the most populated state in the country, but our economy is the 6th. But today it’s the second. We have prepared a roadmap, and the vision that’s been given to us by the PM, and that vision will make us the number one economy in the country, there should be no doubt about that. We had no problems in our work, in the first three years. From March 2017 to March 2020, we were working quite smoothly. After March 2020, corona became a stumbling block — corona has not affected UP alone, but the whole country and the entire world. UP had the biggest challenge to face, we should remember that when the national lockdown took place on March 25, and from thereon we kept facing one challenge after the other. First from Delhi, then Maharashtra and then from all other states, migration started. Forty lakh migrant labourers came back to UP alone. And not just migrant workers from UP, even those going to Bihar, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, and even those heading to Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Haryana, for all these migrants, UP became the epicentre. Not one worker or labourer who did not hail from UP can say that they faced any sort of discrimination. UP hosted them with all due respect and we even made provisions for a 21-day quarantine for the labourers whose states didn’t want them back. We made arrangements for their boarding, lodging and food. About one crore migrant labourers came to UP or transited through UP. We didn’t give anybody any opportunity to complain.