New Delhi, July 19 (UNI) The Congress on Friday accused the Narendra Modi government of creating an economic inequality in the country that is resulting in rich becoming richer and poor becoming poorer and asked whether Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s seventh Budget on July 23 will be able to bridge this gap.
Addressing a press conference at the AICC headquarters, ahead of the Budget, party spokesperson Supriya Shrinate said, “Today the rate of economic inequality in the country is worse than it was in the British Raj. One percent of the population controls 40 percent of the country’s wealth. Due to which the rich are becoming richer… the poor are becoming poorer. Will this budget do anything to bridge this gap?”
Shrinate said that before presenting her seventh budget, Sitharaman had met some industrialists, bankers and farmer organisations and held discussions with them, but whether she met families struggling to have three meals a day or those women who are struggling due to food inflation or farmers waiting to get fair prices for their crops or the youth suffering due to paper leak?
“Has she met the real India?” the Congress leader asked.
Citing LocalCircles report, Shrinate said, “48 percent families on the country are facing financial crisis. People’s income has decreased and they are forced to live with the help of savings. The condition of the country today is – ‘income is a penny and expenditure is a rupee”.
Alleging that the Modi Government has failed to curb inflation, the Congress spokesperson said, “Food inflation has remained consistently above 9 percent and vegetable prices have increased by more than 30 percent. It may not affect the rich, but vegetables have disappeared from the plates of poor. This inflation is everywhere, in transport, school fees, clothes and many others. So the question is – will this budget be able to curb inflation?”
She said, “There is a culture of savings in India. This culture has kept our economy strong. But today we are suffering so much from unemployment, inflation and low income that the domestic debt which never went above 25 percent of GDP, is close to 41 percent today”.
“Household debt has risen to 41 percent of GDP, causing the household savings to fall to less than 6 percent of GDP. Talking about petrol and diesel, five big companies saved about 900 billion rupees by buying cheap oil from Russia. But did petrol and diesel become cheaper for the public?,” she asked.
She said, “Under the BJP Government, we lost the huge opportunity to become a global manufacturing and export-oriented economy when we failed to attract big chunk of the global FDI that exited China and went to Vietnam, Indonesia and Bangladesh instead”.
Accusing the government of ignoring the education sector, the Congress leader said that the education budget was slashed by seven percent while the UGC allocation was cut by 61 percent.
