The Hindu Business Line : Congress chargesheet on NDA govt's 'failures'

IN a calculated move to take the sheen off the "India Shining" campaign of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition government, the Congress today launched a broadside against what it describes as "the NDA's comprehensive and all-round failure" on all fronts in the country's development.

Releasing the chargesheet monograph titled "Vajpayee Government: A saga of sins, scams and shame", senior party leader, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, and the Delhi Chief Minister, Ms Shiela Dixit, told newspersons that the various acts of commission and omission of the NDA Government during its five-year tenure at the Centre has cost the exchequer a massive revenue loss of Rs 49,057 crore.

In a separate part enumerating the failures of NDA Government particularly on the economic front, Mr Mukherjee said this portion highlights "how the public sector assets have been squandered at throw-away prices through disinvestment with Balco and Centaur Hotel" being the instances of nepotism in sales.

He said the Centre has raised Rs 11,260.23 crore from the sale of 31 PSUs, including 18 hotels of the Indian Tourism Development Corporation and three of the Hotel Corporation of India since the sale of Modern Foods in January 2000.

He said during the NDA Government's tenure the Unit Trust of India (UTI) saw one of the biggest financial sector scams and the net asset of the company has been reduced by Rs 25,000 crore, hitting the company's flagship saving scheme of US-64 in which legion of small savers, retired people, widows and pensioners had put their life-time earnings. Mr Mukherjee accused the Ministry of Finance of the UTI scam.

Mr Mukherjee said the unemployment situation in the country has reached alarming dimensions.

Between 1983-84 and 1993-94, the annual rate of growth of employment was 2.67 per cent a year and in the subsequent period from 1993-94 to 1999-2000, this slowed down to 1.07 per cent a year, as illustrated by the NDA Government's Economic Survey for the year 2002-03.

Stating that the plight of the farmers during the NDA rule has been reduced to a pathetic level, Mr Mukherjee said the average annual employment growth in the agriculture sector was 2.23 per cent between 1983 and 1993-94.

The growth was 0.02 per cent between 1993-94 and 1999-2000. He said the agriculture and allied sector grew at an average annual rate of 4.63 per cent during the years 1992-97, but grew only by 2.02 per a year during the years 1997-2002. He said in one district in Anathapur alone 2009 farmers have committed suicide by taking pesticide.

Mr Mukherjee said that "too much tom-tomming of a growth in a quarter in the financial year" would not mean any shine for the economy or the people.

He said that the GDP growth between 1998-2003 averaged 5.5 per cent, compared to 6.6 per cent in the previous five years. In the last three years of the Eighth Plan, he said, the economy's average growth rate was 7.5 per cent.

Mr Mukherjee said that the net loss in output, both agricultural and industrial, as a result of slowdown in the growth of the economy would be Rs 3 lakh crore during the last five years.

Pointing out that the NDA Government should give an account of their performance for the five-year tenure they were in the saddle, Mr Mukherjee said that the Vajpayee Government failed to take the economy to its logical end of reforms, which the Congress had initiated during the early part of the 1990s.