Congress calls Budget ‘capitalist’, says nothing for salaried class, farmers, youth

84 per cent of households have suffered a loss of income in the pandemic years, and per capita income has declined from Rs 1,08,645 in 2019-20 to Rs 1,07,801 in 2021-22, while per capita expenditure has declined from Rs 62,056 in 2019-20 to Rs 59,043 in 2021-22. “An estimated 4.6 crore people have been pushed into extreme poverty. India’s rank in the Global Hunger Index has fallen to 101 (out of 116 countries) and unemployment rates have reached 8.2 per cent for Urban and 5.8 per cent for Rural workers. After the Budget was presented this morning, we asked ourselves what has the Budget done to address any of these grave challenges. The blunt answer is nothing,” Chidambaram said. “By any standard, today’s budget speech was the most capitalist speech ever read by a Finance Minister. The FM has mastered the jargon of capitalist economics. Read her speech again: count the number of times she used the words digital, portal, IT-based, paperless, database, ecosystem, global, atmanirbhar. The word ‘poor’ occurs twice in paragraph 6, and we thank the FM for remembering that there are poor people in this country,” Chidambaram said. “The government behaves and acts as though it is on the right path and has delivered on the issues that matter to the common people. This is false. This is also bull-headed obduracy,” he said. He added the Parliament may vote this Budget because the ruling party has a brute majority in the Lok Sabha, “but the people will reject this capitalist Budget.” Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said the salaried and the middle classes have been affected due to pay cuts and high inflation. “India’s salaried class and middle class were hoping for relief in times of pandemic, all round pay cuts and back breaking inflation. FM and PM have again deeply disappointed them in Direct Tax measures,” Surjewala said on Twitter.