Chennai: Chief Minister M K Stalin accused the Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman of totally neglecting the State and ignoring its interests in her interim budget presented in Parliament on Thursday and took objection to the use of the term ‘four major castes’ to refer to the poor, women, youth and farmers, saying that incorporating such retrograde ideas in a national budget was not acceptable.
Stalin, who is in Spain to meet investors, came out with the statement on the budget calling it a ‘Nil Budget’ that had nothing in it for anybody and as one presented in a cavalier manner in the last lap of the BJP government’s decade long rule that was uneventful.
The budget did not mention any past achievements of the government, provided no solutions for present problems and offered no guarantee for the future, the Chief Minister said, adding that it disappointed the middle class that was expecting a reduction in income tax ceiling, lower of petrol, diesel and LPG prices and many concessions.
The country’s economy had not grown a bit, inflation had not come down, poverty had not been eliminated, unemployment had not been reduced and no reservation had been given to women, though the government had pretended to have done it, he said.
Highlighting the gross neglect of Tamil Nadu, he said that it had been victimized on many counts and that the announcement of forming a committee to address population explosion would be only used to reduce the number of constituencies in the States where the population had come down, he said.
Referring to the Union Minister exulting over an increase in tax collection in the GST regime, Stalin said that the State’s share had come down drastically and it had suffered a loss of Rs 20,000 crore in taxes, besides being deprived of the Rs 7.7 lakh crore of cess.
While the Sitharaman claimed that 15 AIIMS were constructed in the last 10 years, Stalin said that the AIIMS proposed for Madurai was still in a limbo in 2024 though the announcement for it was made in 2015 and the Prime Minister himself had laid the foundation for it in 2019 and pointed to it as a clear case of partiality towards Tamil Nadu, wondering if the step motherly treatment was because the BJP did not get votes in the State.
Though the budget went gaga over the issue of Climate Change, the compensation of Rs 31,000 crore sought by the State government to mitigate the havoc wreaked by two major floods brought by rains had not been provided by the Union Government and the Prime Minister, too, had just ignored the State’s demand for declaring the disaster caused by Cyclone Michaung as a ‘calamity of severe nature,’ he said.
Citing another example of the Union Government’s partially, Stalin said that the funds required for the Metro Rail project had not been sanctioned for 3 years and though the finance minister mentioned the name of chess player Praggnanadhaa and that India had 80 grandmasters, she did not say a word on the successful conduct of the Chess Olympiad in Tamil Nadu.
By stating that the people would re-elect the BJP, Sitharaman had used the Union Budget to express her party’s political greed, he said, forecasting that the people of the country would disappoint them in the elections as much as they had disappointed them in the budget.
TNCC President K S Alagiri said the BJP government had failed to deliver on its promises given in 2014 and had allowed the fiscal deficit to escalate to 5.13 percent after it came to power from the earlier 4.36 percent. The debt burden of the nation, which was at 80 per cent of the GDP now, would touch 100 percent if the same situation continued, he warned.
MDMK general secretary Vaiko, too, flayed the budget, saying that it was pointer to the BJP’s failure in the last one decade, during which the country had seen no growth. He said Corporate Tax had been reduced to 22 percent and no new railway projects had been announced for Tamil Nadu.
