Not naming states in Budget speech doesn’t mean no funds for them: FM Nirmala Sitharaman

The Finance Minister said having presented Budgets for decades, the Congress knows that the Budget speech does not mention all states, yet it raised such questions because it has a problem with an “ordinary chaiwallah OBC” becoming the PM. She named projects announced recently in various parts of the country, and asked if money had not gone to those states to fund them.

Sitharaman reeled out numbers to counter the charge that expenditure on the social sector had been curtailed, and argued that it had actually increased. She also compared each figure she cited with those in the 2013-14 Budget — the UPA government’s last.

Responding to allegations that the government was insensitive towards farmers and unwilling to offer a legal guarantee on purchase of their produce at MSP, Sitharaman launched an attack on the Congress. “The National Commission on Farmers had recommended in 2006 that MSP should be at 50% more than the weighted average cost of production. This was not accepted by the UPA government. The Cabinet note, which was drafted in July 2007, said MSP is recommended by the CACP on objective criteria considering the variety of factors involved. Therefore, setting an increase of at least 50% on the cost may cause distortion in the market. In some cases, there may be a mechanical linkage between MSP and the cost of production per producer,” she said. “After saying this, the UPA rejected the M S Swaminathan report in 2007… Congress can go on shedding crocodile tears about farmers…”

Seeking to counter the Opposition’s charge of jobless growth, she said, “SBI research report which was released in July 2024 said India created 12.5 crore jobs between 2014 and 2023 compared to only 2.9 crore during 10 years of the UPA government… The unemployment rate has declined from 6% in 2017-18 to a low of 3.2% in 2022-23. Youth unemployment for the age group 15-29 has declined sharply from 17.8% in 2017-18 to 10% in 2022-23.”

She also dismissed the Global Hunger Index Reports, saying they were flawed indicators.

Sitharaman hit out at TMC’s Saugata Roy for saying in his speech that he did not expect her to be Manmohan Singh, who had a PhD from Oxford, as she went to “our own JNU” and was bereft of new ideas. She said it was a shame a leader from West Bengal, which gave the slogan ‘Vande Mataram’, showed such contempt for Indian universities. She said his state CM Mamata Banerjee went to a college affiliated to Calcutta University, the state Finance Minister went to Calcutta University, and that Roy himself taught in a college affiliated to Calcutta University. She asked whether they all were bereft of new ideas because of this. “In what way are we less than the Harvards and Oxfords?”