Urging the Union Government to stop “subsidising” the rich, CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat called for strengthening the economic fundamentals in the next Union Budget. In an editorial in the forthcoming issue of People’s Democracy, the CPI(M)’s weekly organ, the party says commitments for strengthening the (economic) fundamentals are listed in the National Common Minimum Programme of the UPA government. “These include vastly increasing public investment in agriculture; spending 6 per cent of the GDP on education and 3 per cent on public health; social security for workers in the unorganised sector; provision of a legally guaranteed minimum hundred days employment for at least one member of the family of rural and urban poor,” says the editorial. Saying tax exemptions, paraded as incentives to the corporate sector, are nothing but subsidies to the rich, the party argues against stopping such subsidies, which are enough to find resources for funding the social sector projects. “While subsidies for the poor are being mercilessly slashed, such subsidies for the rich are multiplying even though they are neither economically or morally tenable,” says the party.
