More than one-third of MLAs in UP have criminal cases: ADR Report

Lucknow: 35 per cent (140) of legislators in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly have criminal cases registered against them and 27 per cent of legislators have some sort of link with crime, says a report by The Association for Democratic Reforms.

The report released on Tuesday had done a detailed survey of 396 sitting legislators in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly that has a strength of 403 members. According to the report, of the 304 MLAs, 77 have criminal cases against them, while 18 in the 49-member Samajwadi Party are in the same category.

In the Bahujan Samaj Party which has 18 members, two have criminal antecedents while the Congress has one such member. The report further states that among the 396 legislators, 313 are crorepatis.

The BJP with 304 MLAs, has 235 crorepatis and the SP has 42 crorepatis in the 49 MLAs. The BSP has 15 crorepatis while the Congress has five.

In BSP, the richest legislators are Guddu Jamali from Azamgarh and Vinay Tiwari from Gorakhpur.

Interestingly, two BJP MLAs, who are ministers, still have loans to repay. They are Nand Gopal Nandi and Siddhartha Nath Singh. The low asset MLAs include Ajay Kumar Lallu of Congress and Dhananjay and Vijay Rajbhar of BJP.

Of the 396 MLAs, 95 have not gone beyond class 12 education level. Four MLAs are just literate while five are diploma holders.

Nearly 206 MLAs are in the age group of 25 to 50 years while 190 are between 51 and 80 years.