AAP relaunches Delhi govt schemes for free coaching, crash victims

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Friday said that the Delhi government has restarted two of its schemes — one, that provides free coaching to students from underprivileged backgrounds who wish to sit for competitive examinations; and the second that provides assistance to road accident victims.
Officials said both proposals were put up and cleared by the Delhi cabinet on Friday.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), however, dismissed the decision to reintroduce the schemes as an attempt to mislead the people of Delhi.
The Jai Bhim Mukhyamantri Pratibha Vikas Yojana was first launched by the state’s SC/ST welfare department in December 2017. Under this scheme, eligible students can register themselves at a coaching centre from a list of empanelled institutes, and get free tuition for competitive exams such as civil services, engineering, and medicine.
Meanwhile, the free accident victims’ treatment scheme or “Farishte scheme”, under which accident victims were provided necessary treatment at private hospitals, began in October 2019.
The coaching scheme was halted in early 2023, while the Farishte scheme was put on hold in December 2023.
After the cabinet meet on Friday, chief minister Atishi said the two schemes were stopped by the BJP which, she claimed, launched a “conspiracy” to send AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal to jail.
“But all these conspiracies failed in front of Arvind Kejriwal’s vision of uplifting the children of poor and deprived classes through education,” she said in a post on X.
Separately, Kejriwal at a press conference said that pending payments for the coaching scheme will be sent to coaching institutes soon.
“Coaching is very costly and people from underprivileged classes cannot afford the coaching… Their kids are intelligent, but they do not get opportunities. The aim of our government is to provide them the same opportunities that the children of the rich get,” he said.
The AAP chief also alleged that the Farishte scheme was stopped at the behest of the BJP.
“When I was in jail, they left no stone unturned in troubling the people of Delhi. They stopped the schemes and works (of the Delhi government) which caused a lot of trouble to the people… Since I came out of jail, my efforts have been to restart the works and schemes that they stopped,” Kejriwal said.
“The coaching scheme collapsed because the government did not pay the 46 private institutions with which it had signed an agreement. The government had contracted with these institutes to provide coaching to poor students. The institutes provided coaching for some time but in reality, the government had cheated the poor students as well as these coaching centres,” BJP MP from South Delhi Ramvir Singh Bidhuri said.
“Now as the elections are round the corner, the government has again announced the implementation of this scheme to deceive the people of Delhi,” he added.