SRINAGAR: Stating that Union Budget is a huge disappointment for the common people, CPI (M) leader Muhammad Yousuf Tarigami Tuesday said that it has failed to address the issue of growing people’s miseries i.e rising unemployment, hunger, skyrocketing price rise.
“It has miserably failed to address the economic recession and the issue of sharp fall in the domestic demand due to the massive decline in the purchasing power of the people. It has not suggested any effective measures to address the virus of inequality. The job losses in the organized sector are alarming. Massive job loss among the educated young people is disturbing,” Tarigami said in a statement issued to the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO).
He said the unemployment scenario in rural India, which was at 9 per cent even in December, 2020 according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), it is inexcusable that the Finance Minister’s speech did not have a single mention of MGNREGS. “Providing employment to the youth has become a chronic issue at the national level and much more so in J&K as it lacks any private sector. The unemployment level in J&K has reached a crescendo,” he said.
Tarigami said it is a fact that a majority of farmers in India are still outside the procurement network, and are denied access to MSPs. “However, the government has announced no plan on how to expand the access of farmers to procurement or MSP. In fact, the Finance Minister has tried to mislead by comparing in her budget speech procurement of last year with procurement in 2013-14, when open market prices were higher than the MSP for many crops and farmers did not need to sell the produce to government agencies.”
“The Finance Minister has herself stated that only 1.54 crore farmers benefited from MSPs for paddy and wheat in 2020-21. This is an admission that a vast majority of farmers have not benefited from the MSP-based procurement. In fact, its medium-term plan is to reduce procurement, which is visible through its insistence on implementing the three Farm Acts. There has been drastic cuts in the allocations to various important departments include Agriculture, Education, Social Welfare, Women and Child Development etc,” he said.