Cong returns Modi fire,reels out numbers to rubbish his claims

Modi had on Sunday challenged the Congress to compare the track record of the NDA and BJP governments and talked about South Korea earning kudos for hosting Olympics while India losing its honour hosting the Commonwealth Games. He spoke about China making great strides in education while India’s spending on the sector coming down. The Congress hit back picking on each of these issues.

Maken said that while the UPA rule saw a 7.9 per cent annual growth,it was 6 per cent during the NDA regime. He also asked about the number of sportspersons from Gujarat who qualified for the Olympics and argued the state was at the bottom at the recent national games with no gold medals out of 444 and seven medals out of the total 1,479.

He said the spending in general education rose from Rs 6,800 crore in 2004 — when UPA came to power — to Rs 52,875 crore this fiscal. In technical education,it increased from Rs 641 crore to Rs 6,518.2 crore,he said,and released figures of posts of principals and senior faculty lying vacant in government engineering colleges and secondary and higher secondary schools in Gujarat.

“Modi,who talks about China spending 20 per cent of its GDP on education,has not pointed out that during the NDA period,the allocation was 1.67 per cent of the GDP which rose to 4.02 per cent in the 11th five-year plan,” he said.

Maken said that as per a 2011 report on domestic tourism,Gujarat ranked 10th,attracting just 2.5 per cent of the national share. “In international tourists,I do not have the data,because Gujarat does not figure in first 10,” he said.

Hitting back,BJP spokesperson Abhimanyu said,“The level of discourse has been lowered by the Congress as it has evaded issues of development and good governance.”

Don’t fall into Cong trap: Sinha

BJP leader Yashwant Sinha in a veiled message to his party suggested that the BJP should not fall into the Congress’s trap of secular-communal debate. He said that such a discourse would deviate from real issues of economic downturn and corruption. “We should bring the debate back to current issues which are basically economic issues. The issue of poverty,bread and unemployment are hurting people. It is not communalism or secularism,” he said.