Citing protection under the Constitution, a BJP’s Member of Parliament (Lok Sabha) on Tuesday gave privilege motion against more than 100 individuals including some journalists for troll on social media regarding his remarks on Gross Domestic Products (GDP).

BJP MP from Godda (Jharkhand) Nishikant Dubey moved the motion under Article 105 of the Constitution. This article provides freedom of speech in Parliament for MPs. On Monday, Dubey mentioned that GDP is not the ultimate truth. This invited widespread criticisms on social media with some twittereti started abusing him badly. Hurt by this, Dubey moved a petition which was accepted by the Lok Sabha Speaker. Procedures says, once motion is accepted and referred to the Privilege Committee, all the named are required to be appeared before the Committee and present their sides.

“We should move away from over-reliance on GDP when assessing a country’s health, towards a broader dashboard of indicators that would reflect concerns such as the distribution of well-being and sustainability in all of its dimensions…. aim is to provide impetus and guidance to the various initiatives currently ongoing on measuring people’s well-being and societies’ progress.”

Dubey had said while quoting verbatim from the report of a high level committee set up by OECD and headed by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E Stiglitz, leading well-being economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, and the OECD Chief Statistician Martine Durand.

Dubey drew the attention of the house to recommendation 6 and 10 of this report.

It says estimate of these two factors are very critical — assessing equality of opportunity is important and the measurement of trust and other social norms should be improved.

He further mentioned that on both these aspects the present government has done better that any other government for the past 70 years. “Today the ease of doing business indicator under this Govt is a way ahead than ever. This is not our finding this is World Bank finding. What was happening in last seven decades, a few set of people used to get benefit and patronage to grow. The economic growth was at the cost of others. Today the situation has radically changed. It is equal opportunity of growth,” he mentioned.

Without taking name of any individual or party, he said that obviously this affects the old order and the dominant players. It is natural that they are uncomfortable.

“But what do you prefer: good business for few or equal opportunity for all? Now has our critics who are screaming GDP GDP factored this? Do they know how to factor this? GDP is not equipped to factor this,” he said.

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