BJP resolution to belittle govt's claim on WTO

The Bharatiya Janata Party's economic resolution will try to pick holes in the Centre's claim about its achievements at the recent World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meet at Hong Kong.

Discussion on the economic and political resolution started during the post-lunch session on the second day of the national executive meeting. However, the resolution will not be made public till it is tabled at the national council meeting, to begin tomorrow..

A senior party functionary, speaking with Business Standard, said "the economic resolution will bring out the fact that developed countries had given a commitment at the beginning of Doha round on doing away with the export subsidy and so the government going ecstatic about getting the 2013-deadline from developed countries is not much of an achievement. In fact, it amounts to giving a long rope to the developed countries."

The resolution will also highlight the fact that the government's claim about the developing countries being allowed to retain subsidies on some special products and that they will be allowed to retain high import duties on farm products is also an eyewash as both these assurances were extracted from the developed countries during the Cancun and Geneva conferences of the Doha round.

In fact, the resolution would bring the fact to the fore that Hong Kong was a lost opportunity to rectify anomalies in the July-2004 draft framework, sources said. It would also talk about how the government is misleading the country on its two much-publicised schemes, namely Bharat Nirman and the Employment Guarantee Scheme.

The amount required for Bharat Nirman is around Rs 4 lakh crore and the government has just provided around Rs 8,000 crore for 2005-06 projects; and so at this rate it would take another 40 years to reach the goal of Bharat Nirman, the senior BJP functionary remarked sarcastically.

The Employment Guarantee Scheme is nothing but a merger of all existing rural employment schemes and that too with restrictions like just one person from a family being entitled to get employment, the sources added.