Union Budget: Unemployment biggest challenge, government’s response ‘too little’: Congress

New Delhi, July 23

Slamming the Union Budget, the Congress on Tuesday said unemployment is the “biggest challenge facing the country” and the government’s response is “too little” and will have little impact on the “grave situation”.

Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram took a swipe at the government over the financial incentives announced in the Budget for Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, claiming that if those announcements had not been made, TDP’s N Chandrababu Naidu and JD(U)’s Nitish Kumar would have withdrawn support to the government.

“These are lifelines. Modi is saving the life of his government. Unless you want his government to come to an end, you will appreciate him.

“He (Modi) is now bending down to Naidu and Kumar and saying that ‘you have saved my life, so take whatever you want’. If they make more demands, he will concede those demands,” Chidambaram said at a press conference at the AICC headquarters.

Chidambaram said he was “disappointed” with the first Budget of the new government.

He said having two income tax regimes is a “bad idea and unacceptable”.

Chidambaram said Nirmala Sitharaman has “virtually adopted” the ideas underlying his party’s proposals on Employment-linked Incentive (ELI) scheme, apprenticeship scheme with an allowance to the apprentice and on the abolition of Angel Tax.

“I wish she had adopted many more ideas from the Congress’s manifesto,” the former Union finance minister said.

Asserting that unemployment is the “biggest challenge facing the country”, he said for a few dozen vacancies or a few thousand posts, millions of candidates apply and write an examination or appear for an interview.

“The response of the government is too little and will have only little impact on the grave unemployment situation. The claim that the schemes announced by the finance minister will benefit 290 lakh people is highly exaggerated,”  the Congress leader said.

Noting that inflation is the other major challenge, Chidambaram pointed out that WPI inflation is 3.4 per cent, CPI inflation is 5.1 per cent and food inflation is 9.4 per cent.

“The Economic Survey has stated that the deflator for manufacturing has been assumed as 1.7 per cent. The deflator(s) assumed by the government have been severely criticised by several knowledgeable economists.

“Unless the puzzle of the ‘deflator’ is resolved, it is not possible to unquestionably accept the claimed GDP growth rate of 8.2 per cent in 2023-24. Besides, the GDP growth rate is no answer to the huge challenge of inflation,” he said.

He said the Economic Survey dismissed the issue of inflation in a few short sentences. The finance minister dismissed it in 10 words in para three of her speech, he said.

“We deplore the casual attitude of the government. And nothing in the Budget speech gives us the confidence that the government will seriously tackle the issue of inflation,” the former finance minister said.

Chidambaram said education, especially school education, is widespread but of poor quality. The other issue concerning education is NEET and the scandal-ridden National Testing Agency, he said.

“Several states have demanded that NEET should be scrapped and the states should be free to adopt their own methods of selecting candidates to various courses in medical education,” he said, adding that there was no response from the government on the issue.

“I did not hear the finance minister refer to school education. Yet, the government is stubbornly clinging to NEET which, you will recall, is an examination at the end of school education. Interestingly, against Budget Estimates of Rs 1,16,417 crore on education, the government spent only Rs 1,08,878,” he said.

Chidambaram said health care is better but not sufficient.

Public health care is growing quantitatively but not in quality, he argued.

“The central government’s expenditure on health care has declined to 0.28 per cent as a proportion of GDP and to 1.9 per cent as a proportion of total expenditure,” he said, adding that there was no response from the government on it.

He claimed that wages have stagnated in the last six years after adjusting for inflation.

“While some relief has been given to the tax-paying citizen in the 0-20 per cent tax bracket, no relief — I repeat, no relief at all — has been given to the poorer sections of the people, especially those who are non-tax paying wage labourers and casual/daily labourers,” he said.

“The government seems to be blissfully ignorant of its own statistics that wages have stagnated in the last six years while inflation is raging. And such workers are not paid a decent minimum wage,” Chidambaram said.

He said one of the demands of the farmers is that the minimum support price (MSP) announced for an agricultural produce must be backed by a legal guarantee.

The Congress had in its election manifesto promised to provide such a guarantee, he said, adding that there was no response from the government.

Chidambaram also said several political parties, including the Congress, have demanded that the “ill-conceived and discriminatory” Agnipath scheme should be scrapped forthwith and the Armed Forces should resume the time-honoured methods of recruitment. The government has no response to this, he added.

The agitation to scrap the Agnipath scheme would continue, the Congress leader said.