Mamata plans visit to village of starvation-deaths infamy
Soma Mookherjee
soma@thestatesman.net
Kolkata, 31 December
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee will visit Amlasol on 6 January to showcase  her government’s development work there. 
Amlasol hit newspaper headlines during the Left Front regime for cases of starvation deaths. People there had to survive on boiled ants. The Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government then was in a denial mode passing off the starvation deaths as deaths due to malnutrition, old age and diseases. Miss Banerjee and the Trinamul Congress launched a country-wide campaign citing the Amlasol deaths as a testimony of the Marxist-government’s “colossal neglect of the poor and the downtrodden.”  
Now, the Trinamul government claims the people of Amlasol don’t have to go on empty stomachs as benefits of development initiatives are percolating to them.
Trinamul all-India general secretary Mukul Roy visited Amlasol yesterday and told The Statesman today that the people of Amlasol and Belpahari are waiting in great excitement for the chief minister’s visit.   “Neither of the former Left Front chief ministers ~ Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee ~ ever visited Amlasol. Even after the news of starvation deaths shocked the conscience of the people of the country Mr Bhattacharjee didn’t have time to see the plight of the people there with his own eyes. On the contrary, Miss Banerjee found the people there living in such abject poverty that they had to eat boiled ants and ant eggs,” said Mr Roy.
The Trinamul government has ensured that the people of Amlasol get two meals a day through distribution of 5 kg rice per family per week at Rs 2 a kg and making BPL cards available to the actual”beneficiaries. During the LFgovernment, Mr Roy alleged, there was rampant corruption in distributing BPL cards and those who didn’t qualify for them were given cards, whereas the really needy people were denied them. The new government has also made arrangements so that the people of Amlasol can draw their weekly rations from police outposts, instead of walking to remote places as they  used to do previously.