Budget Ideas Copied From Congress Criticises Government For Ignoring Unemployment, Farmer Issues: P. Chidambaram
Citing the CMIE report, he said the unemployment rate in the country is 9.2 per cent.
Addressing a press conference at the Congress headquarters in New Delhi, Chidambaram said the Finance Minister has adopted the Congress' proposals to introduce the Employment Linked Incentive (ELI) scheme, the apprenticeship scheme to provide allowance to youth and to abolish angel tax. Criticising the government for the unemployment problem, he said no concrete steps have been taken in the budget to tackle unemployment. The claim of 290 lakh people benefiting from the schemes announced by the Finance Minister is a highly exaggerated figure. He said unemployment is the biggest challenge facing the country. Lakhs of candidates apply and appear for exams for a few dozen vacancies or a few thousand posts. Citing the CMIE report, he said the unemployment rate in the country is 9.2 per cent.
Describing inflation as the second biggest challenge, he said wholesale price index inflation is 3.4 per cent, consumer price index inflation is 5.1 per cent and food inflation is 9.4 per cent. Condemning the government's casual attitude towards inflation, he said there was nothing in the budget speech that could give confidence that the government would deal with the issue seriously. He said, the Economic Survey dismissed the issue of inflation in a few sentences and the Finance Minister also dismissed it in ten words in his speech.
Chidambaram said that the budget did not say anything on education-related issues such as NEET and the scam-hit NTA. Many states have demanded that NEET should be scrapped and states should have the freedom to adopt their own methods for selecting candidates to various courses of medical education.
Regarding the decline in spending on healthcare, he said that it has fallen to 0.28 per cent of GDP and 1.9 per cent of total expenditure. The Finance Minister did not talk about the serious shortcomings in public healthcare.
The former Union Finance Minister said that the wage rate has remained stagnant in the last six years. He demanded that the minimum wage should be fixed at Rs 400 per day for all types of employment.
Chidambaram also raised the issue of legal guarantee on MSP to farmers, which has not been mentioned in the budget. He said that due to massive unemployment, many students who took education loans have defaulted in payment of interest or principal. The government should waive off the outstanding amount of education loans as a one-time measure of relief.
He also mentioned the Agneepath scheme and said that the protest against it will continue till the old system of recruitment in the armed forces is restored.
At the same time, Congress spokesperson Supriya Srinet said that it was a great pleasure to see that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has read the Congress's Nyaya Patra with great attention. Her this Kursi Bachao Budget is a kind of copy-paste of the Congress's Nyaya Patra. We hope and believe that in the coming days she will take up more good things from our manifesto, which will benefit the people of the country.
