Opposition slams govt during debate on Appropriation Bills in Rajya Sabha

Congress MP from Gujarat Amee Yajnik said: “The moot question that arises is how come there is so much error in planning? I would like to know from the honourable finance minister was it devoid of any priorities or was there any misplaced focus when the monies were allocated?”

“Whatever it is or whatever it may be, it definitely indicates a gross miscalculation of expenditure,” Yajnik added.

She also called for gender budgeting to address concerns of women impacted by the Covid pandemic. “The women who have lost their jobs… it has become difficult for them to re-enter the workforce in comparison to men. This is also happening in the MGNREGA sector,” she said.

Yajnik also called for “multi-fold” increase in funds to tackle violence against women. “Women were pushed into the domestic spheres because of Covid. The Covid phase is over now but those women who were pushed into domestic spheres, data shows, suffered domestic violence. There was no way they could get help from the helpline numbers… they could not reach counselling centres,” she said.

TMC member Dola Sen also sought more budgetary allocation for women. “In West Bengal, one in every four MSMEs is led by women,” she said, while underlining the need for better planning on agricultural spending. “Too little agriculture research and sustainable agriculture expenditure is happening when sustainable agriculture is the need of the hour for climate crisis mitigation,” she said.

K Keshava Rao of the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) said this could be due to a “lack of control in preparing the Budget”. He, however, said the supplementary budget will be supported only because the Centre is “taking back criticism of the revdis”. “In the beginning itself, I said, I welcome this only because you are depending more on the subsidies. Subsidy is taking back your own criticism of the revdis,” Rao said.

RJD member Manoj Jha asked the government what it was doing to address unemployment. “Mandir-masjid cannot be synonyms for employment,” Jha said.

John Brittas of the CPI(M) criticised the decrease in government spending. “If there is stagnation, the government spending should have gone up and the interest rates should have come down. This should have been the twin objectives of this government… they did the contrary. The recent GDP data says that in Quarter-2, the government consumption expenditure contracted by 4.4 per cent… alarmingly, it is almost 20 per cent below the pre-Covid level,” Brittas said.