Modi government attacking support structures for poor, Dalits: Rahul

Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday accused the Modi government of attacking support structures that were designed to provide relief to the Dalits, tribals and the poor and said some corporates were being favoured over the rights of the marginalised communities.

Speaking at the Bucerius Summer School at Hambug, Gandhi also attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi over "lack of jobs," demonetisation and "flawed" implementation of the Goods and Services Tax.

Gandhi said all sections should benefit from transformation taking place due to urbanisation and the previous Congress and other governments had created support structures to smoothen the process of change for the Dalits, tribals but the Modi government was the only one not following the idea.

"They do not feel that every single person in India should have access to fruits of transformation. They feel that tribal communities, poor farmers, Dalit, tribal communities should not get the same benefits as the elite of the country gets. We feel everybody took the risk, everybody should get the reward," Gandhi said.

"The other thing they have done is they have started attacking the support structures that were designed to help certain groups of people," he added.

Gandhi referred to alleged dilution of the Scheduled Caste Act and said welfare measures of UPA government such as the right to food and the right to guaranteed employment had been weakened.

He said all the money that was going into these schemes "is going into the hands of very few people", the largest corporates in the country.

Gandhi alleged that demonetisation carried out by Modi had taken away lakhs of jobs as it had destroyed cash flow of small and medium businesses.

"China produces 50,000 jobs every 24 hours, India only 450," Gandhi said, adding that bad implementation of GST had let to closure of thousands of businesses.

--IANS

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