Bhubaneswar: Union petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Friday disputed the Odisha government's claim to have built 17 lakh houses under the Biju Pucca Ghar Yojana, a state government-sponsored rural housing scheme, and urged rural development minister Narendra Singh Tomar to send a high-level inquiry team to probe and find out the real picture.

Referring to the hoardings displayed by the Naveen Patnaik government during the rath yatra of Lord Jagannath in Puri claiming that 17 lakh kuccha (mud) houses had been converted into pucca (concrete) houses under the Biju Pucca Ghar Yojana between 2014 and 2018, Pradhan said: " The Odisha government's own rural housing website, however, has stated that only 2.8 lakh houses have been built under the rural housing schemes sponsored by the state."

He alleged that Odisha was misrepresenting facts regarding its rural housing schemes and projecting the work done under the rural housing schemes of the Centre as exclusive state-sponsored schemes.

Pradhan, the poster boy of BJP in Odisha, said that the BJD government had made a statement in 2016 claiming that it had constructed 10 lakh Biju Pucca Ghar houses for rural poor. "But, in response to a question asked in the Assembly, it shied away from it saying that the information was under compilation."

Stating that there had been several allegations of partisanship and irregularities in the allotment of houses under rural housing schemes, Pradhan accused the state government of bypassing the priority list drawn by the gram sabhas based on 2011 socio-economic caste census and giving precedence to favoured parties.