By Nimesh Bansal
The Yash Bharti Award is the highest award given by the Government of Uttar Pradesh. The awards were commissioned in 1994 by the then Chief Minister, Mulayam Singh Yadav, to honour influential personalities from Uttar Pradesh. The award celebrates notable contributions in the fields of literature, social work, medicine, film, science, journalism, handicrafts, culture, education, music, drama, sports, industry, and astrology. At least that is how it was supposed to be.
The Yash Bharti award recipients get a commendation letter, shawl, and Rs 11 lakh. There is also an option of a Rs 50,000 per month lifetime pension on demand. Notable awardees are Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Amitabh Bachchan, Kailash Kher, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Naseeruddin Shah, Nawazuddin Siddiqui among others. The picture, however, gets murky with a closer look.
Nepotism behind the awards?
The Indian Express has exposed rampant nepotism in doling out the awards. The media house has accessed details of 142 out of nearly 200 winners of the award from 2012 to 2017, through the Right to Information (RTI) Act. They have found the awards were dished out arbitrarily under Akhilesh Yadavs tenure.
The RTI revealed that at least 21 winners wrote directly to the Chief Ministers Office seeking an award for themselves, including former Indian athlete Vijay Singh Chauhan, comedian Raju Srivastava, and film director Sudhir Mishra. A number of other winners like journalist Yogesh Mishra and writer Sunil Jogi bagged the once lucrative award on the singular basis of being recommended by Akhileshs uncleShivpal Yadav. Several other winners have benefitted from writing books in praise of the former Uttar Pradesh CM and having distant connections within the government.
Blame games and misuse of money
Yogi Adityanath ordered a review of the awards earlier this year saying, What was the basis for selecting awardees? Appropriate action will be taken after the review. The dignity of the awards should be maintained. Honouring undeserving people lowers the dignity of the awards. The Samajwadi Party, however, deny any wrongdoing. Rajendra Chaudhary, a party spokesperson, said, The BJP wants to stop every good work done by our government. Yash Bharti was to felicitate personalities from different fields. Every awardee was selected by a high-level committee after due process.
In the blame game, both parties seem to have missed the point. Nearly Rs 5 crore has been earmarked for the award for 2017-18, with an even more astronomical figure already shelled out in previous years. Arbitrary distribution, accusations of nepotism, the undermined sanctity of the lucrative awardhave all made the headlines. However, the misuse of taxpayer money in doling out the prize seems to have been ignored.
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