Congress' top guns Rahul Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram today trashed the Union Budget as a "wasted opportunity" and said the third exercise of the Modi government lacked vision without any "big idea" and was "just housekeeping and accounting".
leading the party's offensive against the government, Gandhi, the Congress Vice President, asserted that the budget's "mere rhetoric", without vision or action, will fool neither farmers nor the poor of this country while Singh, a former Prime Minister, dubbed it as "nitpicking",
Former Finance Minister P Chidambaram described the budget as a "wasted opportunity" and alleged that in the last two years, the government had turned its back on rural India, the agriculture sector, and the social sector programmes.
"After listening to the budget speech or after reading the text, what is the one big takeaway for the average citizenIJ It is that there is no Big idea. This is the third budget of the NDA government. The first two were forgettable. The Prime Minister had promised that he would "reform to transform".
"The word 'reform' is a little understood but much used word. Reform means reform of factor markets or product markets. There is little evidence of such reform in the budget. So, the NDA has followed its own brand of budget making, which is just housekeeping and accounting," he said.
Reeling out figures, Chidamabaram said that the budget speech makes no promise of a fair and remunerative MSP nor is there any major initiative to increase productivity in crucial crops.
Singh said there is "no big idea" in the annual exercise while former Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari on Twitter termed the budget "high on rhetoric, flawed on comparison, low on imagination, bereft of ideas, services oligarchs, constricts freedom of RBI.DEAD SCUD."
Gandhi reminded the Modi government that it had "mocked" Congress earlier on MGNREGA as the government today increased the allocation of rural job flagship scheme launched by UPA government 10 years back by over Rs 3,800 crore in 2016-17.
"Modiji spent the first 2 years mocking the Congress Party's focus on farmers, MNREGA, Rural dev & social spending.
"Now mere rhetoric, without vision or action, will fool neither farmers nor the poor of this country," Gandhi said as the government declared to give a push to rural sector in its budget.
In further tweets, Gandhi said that the budget "lacks both vision & conviction."
He said the exercise was a list of "new promises without any account of the failure of tall promises made in last 2 budgets".
Singh said there is no big idea except one idea which was mentioned yesterday by the Prime Minister himself that the government plans to double the farmers' income in the next five years.
"I think that is an impossible dream and there is no inclination or no way of telling the country how will it be achieved because it implies a 14 per cent increase in foreign income for each of the five years," Singh said.
An ace economist, Singh at the same time said that he was glad that the Finance Minister was able to stick to fiscal deficit target that was outlined by him.
Chidambaram said he had predicted that the government will comfortably achieve the target of fiscal deficit in the current year.
"It has, and I am happy. I am also happy that the government has spurned the advice of the Chief Economic Adviser and stuck to its own fiscal consolidation path for 2016-17. I take it as a vindication of the UPA government's policy declared after adopting the Vijay Kelkar committee's report on fiscal consolidation," he said.
Alleging that the government "boasts" that it earned more tax revenues than it had budgeted at the beginning of the year, Chidambaram posed a number of questions.
"Did they collect more corporate taxIJ No. Did they collect more income taxIJ No. What they collected more was excise duties. It is a whopping increase of Rs 54,334 crore! That amount was due to the numerous times the government increased excise duties on petrol and diesel after the budget was presented last year," he said.
Chidambaram alleged that the NDA government "reneged" on its promise to give cost plus 50 percent to farmers while there is "little" to encourage or attract private investment.
"The government seems to be unaware of the problems of the core sectors such as power, steel, coal, mining, cement, construction, and oil and gas. In these sectors, many projects are stranded and there is little new investment. Besides, there is the problem of high interest rates. I am disappointed that these issues were not addressed.
"Except for one bland sentence in paragraph 86, there is no mention of exports. I think, after 14 successive months of negative growth, government has given up on the export front," he said.
Holding that the reduction in the corporate tax rate for a very limited class from 30 percent to 29 percent is "laughable", Chidambaram said while the government promised a predictable tax regime, the second part of the speech "belies" that promise.
"There is no major relief to the tax payer or the middle class or the small and medium businessperson," he said.
Chidmbaram said that despite having an absolute majority in the lok Sabha, government could not summon the courage to repeal the retrospective tax on capital gains.
"How much does that leave for growthIJ It would be a pity that all this elaborate exercise yields, ultimately, moderate GDP growth of about 6 percent," he said.