Union Budget for 2016: A wasted opportunity, says Congress

Congress President Sonia Gandhi and party members during the presentation of the Union Budget 2016-17 in the Lok Sabha in New Delhi. (Photo: PTI)

The main Opposition Congress’ top guns — party vice-president Rahul Gandhi, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and former Union finance minister P. Chidambaram — on Monday criticised the Union Budget for 2016-17 as a “wasted opportunity” and said the third exercise of the Modi government lacked vision. had no “big idea” and was “just housekeeping and accounting”.

Leading the party’s offensive against the government, Mr Gandhi asserted that the Budget was “mere rhetoric”, while Dr Singh dubbed it as “nit-picking”.

While reminding the Modi government of how it had “mocked” the Congress earlier on MGNREGA and now it had increased the allocation to the rural job flagship scheme launched by the UPA government 10 years ago by over Rs 3,800 crore for 2016-17, he said, “Modiji spent the first two years mocking the Congress party’s focus on farmers, MGNREGA, rural development and social spending. Now mere rhetoric, without vision or action, will fool neither farmers nor the poor of this country,” Mr Gandhi said .

In further tweets, Mr Gandhi said the Budget “lacks both vision & conviction”. He tweeted that the exercise was a list of “new promises without any account of the failure of tall promises made in last 2 budgets”.

Mr P. Chidambaram described the Budget as a “wasted opportunity” and claimed 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 citizen 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, Mr Chidambaram said the Budget speech makes no promise of a fair and remunerative MSP nor is there any major initiative to increase productivity in crucial crops.

“Thanks to the crash in oil prices that required hardly any effort. The government boasts that it earned more tax revenue than it had budgeted at the beginning of the year. Did they collect more corporation tax No. Did they collect more income-tax No. What they collected more was excise duties,” he said.

Dr Manmohan Singh said there was “no big idea” in the annual exercise except one idea mentioned the other day by the Prime Minister himself — that the government plans to double 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,” Dr Singh said. An ace economist, Dr Singh at the same time said he was glad that the finance minister was able to stick to the fiscal deficit target outlined by him.

Addressing a press conference at AICC headquarters Mr Chidambaram said three areas were crying for attention — rural economy, private investment and exports.

“On agriculture, I am happy that the UPA schemes are being continued, but the crucial signal is price. The Budget speech makes no promise of a fair and remunerative MSP nor is there any major initiative to increase productivity in crucial corps.”

“On private investment, this is one of the four engines of economic growth and it has been sputtering for the last 18 months. The government seems to be unaware of the problems of 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. On exports, except for one bland sentence in paragraph 86, there is no mention of exports,” Mr Chidambaram said, adding, “After 14 successive months of negative growth, the government has given up on the export front.”