Pulwama martyr from MP & promises made to his family forgotten by govt

JABALPUR: It was a lonely remembrance day for the family of Pulwama martyr Ashwin Kacchi in a Jabalpur village on Wednesday, the fifth anniversary of the Pakistan terror attack in which Kacchi and 39 of his CRPF colleagues were killed.
No one showed up on Wednesday to meet Kacchi’s family in Khudawal village, barely an hour’s drive from Jabalpur city.
Many promises made by the Madhya Pradesh govt are still unkept.The family spent Rs 6 lakh and built a statue on their own after getting tired of waiting for the govt. After TOI reported it last year, the govt promised to build a garden around it, but not a brick has been laid. The house given by the govt is crumbling. A school was supposed to be named after him, but there is no sign of it.
Army and CRPF officers and some ex-Servicemen -- the martyr’s brothers in uniform -- garlanded the statue and a ‘kanya bhoj’ organized by the family, but no public representative or govt official set foot in Khudawal.
“During Ashwin’s last rites and also during the inauguration of the statue that we built, administrative officials and public representatives had promised us that a school will be built in his name and the place where the statue has been erected will be developed as a park. But those are still just promises. Not a single official or representative turned up to pay homage to the martyr,” Ashwin’s brother Sumant Kacchi told TOI.
The martyr’s niece Priyanka Kacchi said, “Whenever we talk to public representatives about the the school in my uncle's name or the park that was promised, they say ‘haven’t you got Rs 1 crore from the government’? I think the sacrifice of any soldier should not be weighed in monetary terms. The martyrdom of jawans is made an issue in elections, but no one turns up to offer homage to them later on. The house that the government has given to us is also in a deplorable condition, promises remain unfulfilled.”
Even in Bhopal, the govt took over a year to keep its promise to name a road after Group Captain Varun Singh, a Shaurya Chakra awardee, who died in the chopper crash that killed CDS Bipin Rawat and 12 others.