Hyderabad: Senior Congress leader and government adviser Mohammed Ali Shabbir said he was “profoundly disappointed with the interim Budget” presented by Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday over the lack of sufficient allocations for minorities.
Ali Shabbir said that the allocation for minorities' welfare was just 0.06678 per cent of the total outlay.
“Minorities, who constitute 15 per cent of the country’s total population, have been allocated just `3,183 crore in a Budget of `47.66 lakh crore. The PM, who speaks of ‘sabka vikas’, should explain how he plans to ensure welfare of minorities,” he said.
BRS leader and former MP B. Vinod Kumar said, “Budget was a political statement rather than a financial statement. The Central government failed in giving promised two-crore jobs to unemployed youth. There is no headway in formation of a committee to determine the MSP (minimum support price) and the Swaminathan Committee recommendations have not been implemented. The potential of the young population in the country is not being harnessed.”
Senior BJP leader P. Muralidhar Rao said that the Budget was prepared with an eye on the future. “We are giving equal importance to development and welfare. Promising three-crore houses after constructing two crore houses in the past ten years is an achievement. The infrastructure development has been done at a faster pace in the last decade.”
However, the Left parties were not convinced.
“While promising to eradicate poverty and make the country a developed nation by 2047, the government has cut subsidies on food and fertilisers from `4.13 lakh crore to `3.7 lakh crore, thereby, amounting to a deficit of `43,000 crore. Even the allocation for NREGS has been slashed from `90,860 crore of two years ago to `86,000 crore. The country currently has a debt of `168.3 lakh crore, which is higher by `16 lakh crores from last year’s Budget. It did not address rising inflation and unemployment,” CPI state secretary Kunamneni Sambasiva Rao said.
CPM-affiliated Telangana Rythu Sangham, which is planning to hold statewide protests on February 3, in a release, said that “although there are 14.75 crore farmers, Kisan Samman is being given to only eight crore of them.”
“The much-vaunted Fasal Bima Yojana is giving only 25 per cent of the losses incurred by farmers. The farmers are losing `4 lakh crore per year owing to (the Centre’s) failure to give remunerative prices,” said Pothineni Sudarshan, state president of Telangana Rythu Sangham.
