By Shishir Prashant 
PrashantNews
Union Minister for Parliamentary Affairs and Minority Affairs Kiren Rijiju has claimed that he was instrumental in building a road to Gunji, a remote border area on the Kailash Mansarovar route in Pithoragarh district of Uttarakhand.
Sharing an interesting anecdote, Rijiju said “when I got a chance to serve as a Minister in the first term with Modi ji, I thought that I should go to Gunji. This area is so remote that even the local MLA don’t visit this place. It is very far,” Rijiju said speaking at a function in Dehradun on Monday.
He said even local people who had migrated from Gunji long back and are settled in places like Delhi rarely go back to their village. He shared an incident where he met a Delhi university professor named Gujyal. “I inquired from him (Gujyal) about his village Gunji. Then he told me that he was from Gunji. Gunjyal further said he has not visited his village since he came to Delhi. “Since I came to Delhi 25 years ago, I have not gone to my village. It takes seven to eight days to go to the village and nowadays there is complete exodus there and no one even lives there,” Gunjyal said.
“And when I became the Home Minister, my first decision was to go to Gunji,” Rijiju said. From Safdarjung MHA airbase in Delhi, Rijiju flew to Gunji in 2 hours and 50-minute time. And when Rijiju said he landed in Gunji, he was told that there is no road in Gunji. I was told that even after 67 years of independence, there is no road. The people there said that they have stopped even thinking about the road. Then he said he took a decision to build a road to Gunji. And in four years, the road was finally completed, Rijiju said.
A day later on Tuesday, Congress MLA Harish Dhami from Dharchula claimed in the Vidhan Sabha that no development work has taken place in his constituency since 2017. “No new road has been built in my constituency since 2017,” Dhami said.