The Congress yesterday attacked the BJP for skirting the question of rationalisation of power tariff by simply passing the buck on the question of subsidy to the states rather than working for a consensus on the issue at the national level.
The party would however support a Bill on setting up a tariff commission, whenever such a Bill is introduced in Parliament, Congress spokesman Salman Khursheed said.
Kursheed pointed out that that BJP government has said that it is not against subsidised power to farmers but has left the subsidy burden to be picked up by state governments who would never be able to bear the financial burden. As it is, the Uttar Pradesh government was not charging for power supplied to the rural areas worth about Rs 800 crores annually, he said.
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Referring to the objections raised by the AIADMK, Khursheed said it was evident that the government had not even consulted its allies on the issue, leave alone trying to build a consensus.
The Congress spokesman said that former finance minister Manmohan Singh was a strong supporter of abolishing all subsidies but had to finally succumb to political pressure of the party to continue with them. The BJP-led government should also have been open about the issue, he said.
The party also questioned the haste in which a large number of foreign investment proposals running into thousands of crores of rupees were being cleared by the government. The party asked if this was an attempt to subsidise American investment in the wake of sanctions imposed by the country on India for conducting nuclear tests.
The Congress made it clear that it was all for foreign direct investment but opposed to it when it came as a rescue to a government which had not studied its implications.