TRS Nizamabad MP K Kavitha on Monday opposed disinvestment in the public sector undertakings. The MP minced no words in lashing out at the Centre for downsizing the Central sponsored schemes which would pose a burden on the common man.
Participating in the debate on Union Budget in the Lok Sabha on Monday, Kavitha termed the Budget as anti-women, anti-poor and pro-corporate.
She said that the Centre wanted to limit the fiscal deficit at three per cent. To achieve this goal of three per cent, the government was making money by selling public sector units and disinvestment of a few profit-making public sector units, she said.
“As a woman, this really looks to me as if you were pawning your jewellery to run your house. As a young Parliamentarian, I would really want your insight on these issues,” Kavitha told Union finance minister Arun Jaitely.
The MP talked about two macro-economic parameters. “One would be the GDP. As projected by our government it is 7.4 per cent, but it is unfortunate it is being ridiculed and challenged. RBI asked the government to clearly spell out the methodology by which this GDP was calculated. In fact there has been discussion and ridicule by the international experts,” she said.
“Economic Survey says that country’s GDP is going to match up with China’s GDP in 2015. It really looks like an over the top kind of estimate. While the IMF estimates that in 2016 we will grow by 7.5 pc, we estimated that we will grow by 8.1 pc. How do we match this? Usually the gap has been very narrow between the estimates of IMF and the Union government. So, this 0.5 per cent gap in the GDP estimate can have a serious implication,” Kavitha said. She also opposed the slashing down of corporate tax to 25 pc.
Particularly, eight schemes of the Central fund were terminated and then there is a drastic reduction in about 11 important schemes relating to education, health nutrition, drinking water, weaker section, housing, farmers and irrigation,” she said.
She said that the allocation for agriculture was cut down by 14.3 per cent and wanted to increase the outlay by ` 50,000 crore more to help the farmers of this country.
Source: The New Indian Express