NRI Sabha membership crosses 18,000 mark in Punjab

Friday, 18/01/2013

http://epaper.dailypostindia.com/Details.aspx?id=60352&boxid=57050&uid=&dat=2013-01-18

Jalandhar : The NRI Sabha Punjab elections 2013 would witness the maximum response from the United Kingdom (UK) based NRIs, courtesy an increase in the number of NRI sabha members, which has witnessed an upward trend in the past couple of years.

A whopping 18,000 plus members from the UK, Canada, US and even the Gulf Nations have taken up the membership of the NRI Sabha, the presence of which would be seen during the NRI Sabha elections for the post of president on January 27.

As the UK has NRIs from the prosperous Doaba belt of Punjab, representing the second and third generations of Punjabis abroad, the response of the membership has been the maximum from this part of the world.

“Till some couple of years ago, the membership of NRI Sabha was around 12,000 and the increase in the number shows that more and more NRIs look forward to the sabha as a common platform to air their grievances and getting heard on a larger scale in their native places”, said Kamaljit Singh Hayre, a contestant and the former president of NRI Sabha.

NRIs maintained that the higher the number of members of the NRI Sabha, the better representation they would get in Punjab. “It is a body, which has been set up as a mouthpiece for the NRIs in Punjab. It is must that the sabha gets maximum members so that the NRIs could get a strong ground to raise their voice and elect a person of their choice as the president,” they added.

Canada is second such country where Punjabis from across the state, especially the Doaba belt, has been coming out in large number owing to a strong network of Punjabi media too, claimed the NRIs. Even the US has a large number of Punjabis there and the sabha has managed to rope in many NRIs from there too.

“Around 10,000 NRIs have joined the sabha in the NRI Sabha Punjab while another contribution of 8,000 has been done by the district headquarters from Punjab. However, the response from the gulf countries like Dubai, Doha Qatar has been very less. This despite the fact that after Kerala, it is Punjab from where maximum NRIs have gone to the gulf countries,” said Jasbir Singh Gill, another contestant of the NRI Sabha elections.

Earlier, on Thursday, around six NRIs filed their nomination papers for the elections. These include Jasbir Singh Gill from the UK, Pritam Singh from the US, Jagjit Singh Toor from the UK, Sarabjit Singh from Italy and Sukhwant Singh and Gurjeet Kaur from Germany.

UK based NRI Kamaljit Singh Hayre, the former NRI Sabha president, filed his nomination papers on Wednesday. The scrutiny of the nomination papers would be held on January 18.