Budget a 'wasted opportunity', lacks vision: Congress

Congress' top guns Rahul Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram today trashed the Union Budget as a "wasted opportunity" and said the third exercise of the Modi government lacked vision without any "big idea" and was "just housekeeping and accounting".
Leading the party's offensive against the government, Gandhi, the Congress Vice President, asserted that the budget's "mere rhetoric", without vision or action, will fool neither farmers nor the poor of this country while Singh, a former Prime Minister, dubbed it as "nitpicking",
Former Finance Minister P Chidambaram described the budget as a "wasted opportunity" and alleged that in the last two years, the government had turned its back on rural India, the agriculture sector, and the social sector programmes.

"After listening to the budget speech or after reading the text, what is the one big takeaway for the average citizen? It is that there is no Big idea. This is the third budget of the NDA government. The first two were forgettable. The Prime Minister had promised that he would "reform to transform".
"The word 'reform' is a little understood but much used word. Reform means reform of factor markets or product markets. There is little evidence of such reform in the budget. So, the NDA has followed its own brand of budget making, which is just housekeeping and accounting," he said.

Reeling out figures, Chidamabaram said that the budget speech makes no promise of a fair and remunerative MSP nor is there any major initiative to increase productivity in crucial crops.

Singh said there is "no big idea" in the annual exercise while former Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari on Twitter termed the budget "high on rhetoric, flawed on comparison, low on imagination, bereft of ideas, services oligarchs, constricts freedom of RBI.DEAD SCUD."
Gandhi reminded the Modi government that it had "mocked" Congress earlier on MGNREGA as the government today increased the allocation of rural job flagship scheme launched by UPA government 10 years back by over Rs 3,800 crore in 2016-17.

"Modiji spent the first 2 years mocking the Congress Party's focus on farmers, MNREGA, Rural dev & social spending.
"Now mere rhetoric, without vision or action, will fool neither farmers nor the poor of this country," Gandhi said as the government declared to give a push to rural sector in its budget.
In further tweets, Gandhi said that the budget "lacks both vision & conviction."
He said the exercise was a list of "new promises without any account of the failure of tall promises made in last 2 budgets".