New Delhi: Job creation as the focus of this year's budget and the Centre's much publicised spends on infrastructure became the two key issues over which Congress's Shashi Tharoor and the BJP's Jay Panda butted heads this evening, each expressing views that are polar opposites. The huge push for internship and jobs for first-timers has been criticised by the Congress as plagiarism from its election manifesto. Senior leaders of the party, including P Chidambaram and now Mr Tharoor, have expressed the view that the government's version is a pale imitation at best.
Speaking to NDTV today, Mr Tharoor said the Congress vision has been "diluted", undermining its worth.
"We talked of giving 1 lakh for apprenticeship, which trains people for real jobs while this is only Rs 60,000 a year and is an internship, which is an assistant kind of role," he said. Also, the government is using CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) funds which is ending up covering a company's own costs instead of being used for society, he added.
Mr Panda commented that the Congress leader was taking credit for the Centre's ideas, which, he said, was Mr Tharoor's "subtle way" of giving a compliment. Employment, Mr Panda said, is a perpetual problem in India, but the government has got a handle on it, as data from the Reserve Bank of India has made clear.
In its 10-year term, the UPA had created 29 million jobs, compared to the 125 million jobs created by the Narendra Modi government over the last nine years, he said, calling it a "Holy grail achieved".
Here, he was vociferously interrupted by Mr Tharoor, who said it was to the "eternal discredit" of the RBI that it had backed that data.
Mr Tharoor also pointed out that Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman never once mentioned the UPA's flagship welfare programme MNREGA, and the allocations for the key health and education sectors have gone down.
About infrastructure, one of the most dominant sectors in PM Modi's tenure which gets a lion's share of the outlay in every budget, Mr Tharoor questioned the quality of work done, citing examples of the roof collapse at the Delhi airport, the collapse of five bridges in Bihar, canopies to two more airports, Rajkot and Jabalpur collapsing, and the crack in Mumbai's trans-harbour link. "What is infrastructure allocation doing if it is not giving lasting benefit to the nation," he questioned.
Mr Panda pointed out that much of this infrastructure was built in the UPA era.
This year, the government has allocated a record Rs 11,11,111 crore on capital infrastructure, which is 3.4 per cent of the GDP. Over the last three years, the government has doubled spending on infrastructure as a way to boost the economy. As a percentage of GDP, longer-term capital expenditure has risen from 1.7 per cent in 2019-20 to 3.4 per cent in the current year.