Former Environment & Forests Minister Jayanthi Natarajan's resignation drama may be quickly receding from public memory but some of the charges levelled by her in her farewell letter to Sonia Gandhi are worth revisiting.
Ms. Natarajan claimed in the letter that she was being unfairly accused of delaying large infrastructure projects in 2013 while she was only carrying out instructions sent to her by Rahul Gandhi, Congress vice-president. The letter was accessed by the newspaper The Hindu and created a furore within the Congress party and gave the ruling BJP party additional ammunition to fling at the previous government for the economic slowdown generally and stuck projects specifically.
Looking at data from that period, it now appears that the majority of the projects stuck with the Ministry of Environment & Forests she headed in December 2013 were located in the state of Gujarat, whose Chief Minister was Narendra Modi of rival BJP, the party that came to power in the May 2014 parliamentary elections.
Data tabled in the Rajya Sabha shows that as on August 2013, of the 330 project proposals lying with the Ministry of Environment, Gujarat led the list with 52 projects.
Madhya Pradesh (MP), Chattisgarh and Punjab were the other big states with projects awaiting clearances.