Opposition parties slammed the Modi Government’s second Budget of its second tenure saying the BJP led NDA regime has failed to meet mass aspirations of creating employment and in a nutshell it has also given up on reviving the economy and accelerating growth.
While Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said there was no strategic idea or anything concrete in the Union Budget and it described the “hollow” approach of the Government that was “all talk and nothing happening”, former Finance Minister P Chidambaram said the Modi Government is in complete denial that the economy faces a “grave macro-economic challenge”. The Left parties said the Budget consisted of just “platitudes” and did not address the problems faced by the people.
Talking to reporters outside Parliament soon after the presentation of the budget, Rahul described it as repetitive, saying the budget does not address the main issue of unemployment confronting the country’s youth and the poor state of the economy.
“The main issues confronting this country today are unemployment and the situation as far as the economy is concerned. I did not see any concrete idea, any strategic idea that would help our youngsters get jobs. I saw a lot of tactical stuff, redundant things, I did not see any central idea,” the former Congress chief said.
“The speech was over 2.5 hours long and I did not find any strategic thing in it. The main issue is employment and economy. There is redundancy and income tax has been complicated instead. The Government’s approach is visible in this budget. It did not have anything in it. It was hollow,” he said and later tweeted the Prime Minister and Finance Minister both looked like they have absolutely no clue what to do next.
Addressing a Press conference at Congress headquarters, Chidambaram said there is nothing in the Budget that leads one to believe that growth will revive in 2020-21 and the claim of 6 to 6.5 per cent growth next year is “astonishing and even irresponsible”, the former finance minister said at a press conference.
The former Finance Minister said Indian economy is demand-constrained and investment-starved, and the incumbent Finance Minister has not acknowledged these two challenges. “It was a laundry list of old (that is current) programmes. I am pretty certain that even the most loyal BJP MP or supporter cannot latch on to any idea or statement in the Budget speech and take it to the people,” Chidambaram said.
CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury said it did nothing to alleviate “people’s miseries”. “Just platitudes & slogans. Nothing substantial to alleviate peoples’ misery, the growing unemployment, rural wage crash, farmers’ distress suicides and galloping prices,” he tweeted.