‘FOR THE RICH, OF THE RICH AND BY THE RICH’: PC SLAMS BUDGET
NEW DELHI: Congress leader and former finance minister P Chidambaram on Thursday hit out at the government for presenting a budget that, he alleged, had nothing for the poor and was “for the rich, of the rich and by the rich.”
Taking part in a discussion on the budget in Rajya Sabha, the senior leader said the Budget was for the 1% of India’s population that controls 73% of its wealth. “There is nothing in it for the poor people of the country who are suffering…they have been ignored. We must record our strongest dissent against this Budget. And because of this, we will be called andolanjeevi and parjeevi,” Chidambaram said.
Andolanjeevi is a term coined by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for people who live off protests. Parjeevi is a parasite.
Chidambaram said the government must make use of its mountain of foodgrains to provide free rations to the poor and also start cash transfers. “One day the poor will wake up and show the government, in a nonviolent and peaceful way, what it has done and what it should have done.” On February 1, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented her third budget, boosting capital expenditure in an attempt to nurse the pandemic-ravaged economy back to health. “I cannot use a harsher word than incompetent in Parliament. Three years of incompetent economic mismanagement means that at the end of 2020-21, we will be exactly where we were in 2017-18,” he said. Minister of state for finance Anurag Thakur, however, noted that the markets had reacted positively.