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'The FM has duped those below the poverty line'

BUDGET 2000

Sitaram Yechury

The Budget is not friendly to anyone, except to maybe foreign institutional investors and the MNCs.

It has many dangerous potentials. The increase in the price of food for people below the poverty line is indeed going to make the poverty situation worse. In a situation where the food grain production is declining, hikes in fertiliser prices pose serious problems.

Reduction in revenues from customs duties, but increases from excise duties mean a policy loaded heavily against the domestic industry. An eight per cent hike in excise duties will fuel inflation. These are sufficient reasons to conclude that the finance minister had neither a plan nor vision on which way India should go.

Opposing this Budget is our game plan. The only thing it rolls back is the little support that so far was reaching out to the poor.

We will protest against this. Join us. All the essential commodities were those which had an eight per cent duty earlier. All of them will now cost much more.

What is appalling in this Budget is that over 80 per cent of your capital expenditure has gone only to defence, leaving very little for social infrastructure. The FM has duped those below the poverty line. They now have to pay Rs 4.10 and Rs 5.10 per kilo of wheat and rice respectively instead of Rs 2.50 and Rs 3.50. All this has been done in the name of the poor!

It is in fact loaded against the rural sector especially when agricultural growth rate is down to 0.8 per cent and food grain production by four million tonnes. Starving people in India is not the direction I would have sought.

My Budget would have aimed at expanding domestic demand through large doses of capital expenditure in building our social and economic infrastructure. This would have generated employment and at the same time generated sufficient demand to sustain a higher industrial activity.

You may well ask where will you get the resources for such capital expenditure? I would have widened the tax base by taxing the rural rich which this government has refused to do.

I wish I could share your optimism that by increasing defence expenditure these tensions can be resolved. Unfortunately they cannot be. They require a political solution. This government does not even seem to consider this option. The protection of our security concerns are non-negotiable. But protecting our security and jingoism are two different things.

In any case, saying that the Congress is the cause for all ills today is like the old belief that today's problems and miseries are due to the sins we committed in previous incarnations! Come, let us try to correct the course; don't occupy yourself with remorse for the past.

Sitaram Yechury is a member of the CPI-M Politburo.

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