Rapid increase in I-T returns filed shows people’s trust in govt: PM Modi

Modi said the income tax return figures show people’s trust in the government is becoming stronger. “It is clearly visible to them that the economy, which ranked globally number 10 before 2014, has reached fifth position today,” he said. “People of India cannot forget the period before 2014, which was an era of scams and corruption — the poor were robbed of their rights and their money even before it reached them.”

Today, he remarked, the money meant for the poor is directly reaching their accounts.

The Prime Minister attributed the high spending on welfare policies as an outcome of “plugging leakage in the system”.

Emphasising that large-scale investments have created jobs in all parts of the country, he said, “One such example is the Common Service Centres (CSC). Five lakh new CSCs have been set up in villages since 2014, and each such centre provides jobs to many people. So welfare of the villages and the poor has been ensured, and employment opportunities created at the same time.”

Speaking on the NEP, Modi said that equal importance is now given to both traditional knowledge and state-of-the-art technology. “A new curriculum has been chalked out for primary education; commendable work has been done in terms of imparting education in mother tongue. A great injustice was done (earlier) to students who did not know English by not allowing them education in mother tongue; it was against social justice. Our government has done away with this injustice — emphasis is now laid on books in regional languages.”

This, he noted, will be the basis of the “massive reform in India’s education system”.