JAKHAR LASHES OUT AT CENTRE FOR BACKSTABBING BELEAGUERED FARMERS BY IGNORING THEM IN UNION BUDGET

TAKES A DIG AT AKALIS, ESPECIALLY HARSMIRAT, OVER NON-SERIOUSNESS ON BUDGET ISSUES

Nabaz-e-Punjab Bureau, Chandigarh, February 1:
Terming the Union Budget as directionless and anti-poor, Gurdaspur MP and Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) chief Sunil Jakhar on Thursday charged the central government with backstabbing the beleaguered farmers of the country.
In a statement issued here, Jakhar lashed out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for deliberately overlooking the issues and concerns of the distressed peasantry, already suffering from huge debt burdens.
The budget would also hit the common man by unleashing fresh inflationary trends, thus resulting in sky-rocketing prices of consumer goods, besides adversely impacting the middle class, which, far from receiving any income tax relief had been burdened with 1% cess.
On the farmers’ issue, the PPCC president said there was no concrete announcement in the budget for the betterment of the community, which was passing through an acute economic crisis due to the ill-conceived policies of the Union Government. He pointed out that the Finance Minister had been completely silent on the issue of the debt waiver, despite the fact that before UP polls, the Prime Minister himself had promised farm loan waiver. He added that the Prime Minister had similarly also promised to give pension to the farmers but no announcement has been made in this regard in the budget.
Terming Jaitley’s announcement to increase the MSP to 1.5 times the cost of production as a big fraud on the farming community, Jakhar said the finance ministry’s calculations were inexplicable since, in reality, the farmers were not even getting the full MSP. Jakhar further said that irrigation had a vital role in farming sector but a meagre amount of Rs 2600 crores was allocated for groundwater irrigation.
Jakhar said that the agriculture sector could immensely benefit from the Food Processing Sector but only Rs 1400 crores had been earmarked for this sector in the budget. Referring to the so-called “big ticket” announcements regarding food processing industry, Jakhar also took a dig at Union Food Processing Minister Harsimrat Badal, saying that the seriousness of the NDA partners towards the budget was evident from the fact that their Akali partner was conspicuous by her absence from the proceedings. Jakhar also ridiculed the tall claims of the Shiromani Akali Dal that they were the real sympathisers of farming community, saying these had been exposed by the fact that Harsimrat was not even present in the Parliament when the budget was tabled.
On the Rs 5 lakh medical insurance to the poor sections of society, Jakhar pointed out that a Rs 1 lakh health insurance scheme was announced by the central government two years ago but had not been notified till date.
He said that the BJP-led NDA government had been befooling the citizens of the country with unsubstantiated calculations and assurances to tackle the inflation but they had miserably failed on this count, as evident from this anti-people budget. The budget had destroyed the hopes of millions of Indians, especially the beleaguered peasantry, said Jakhar, hoping that this budget would prove to be the proverbial last nail in the coffin of the BJP-led NDA government, which was living in fool’s paradise with its hopes of staging a comeback in 2019.