The Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today blasted the Congress-led UPA Government’s decision to grant industrial tax concessions to Himachal Pradesh, Uttrakhand and Jammu & Kashmir and keeping Punjab out of the ambit of the package, despite repeated and earnest pleas of the Punjab government.
“The UPA Government is clearly working to a plan to inflict economic devastation of the sensitive border state of Punjab through its deliberately ruinous policies. It does not require a great economist to understand that Punjab, as a land-locked state along an active and hostile international border, has a much better claim on the tax concessions being given to its neighboring states. But it has put all economic fundamentals and fiscal prudence to the sword in a single pursuit of its goal to reduce Punjabis to the status of beggars. “
“The UPA Government is clearly working to a plan to inflict economic devastation of the sensitive border state of Punjab through its deliberately ruinous policies. It does not require a great economist to understand that Punjab, as a land-locked state along an active and hostile international border, has a much better claim on the tax concessions being given to its neighboring states. But it has put all economic fundamentals and fiscal prudence to the sword in a single pursuit of its goal to reduce Punjabis to the status of beggars. “
The Chief Minister said that he was not against concessions being given to any state but only against the denial of similar concessions to Punjab which sits in the jaws of a hostile neighboring and in proximity to disturbed conditions along our internal borders with J & K.
“We only demand a level playing ground. We merely ask that we may be allowed to compete on even terms. We seek no favors, even though Punjab deserves a special package because of several historical and geographical factors.”
Badal said that these concessions to neighboring states had not only stopped the inflow of industrial capital investment in the state but had destroyed even our existing industrial units and resulted in a flight of capital at a disastrous scale. Independent and learned economists have put the scale at nearly Rs. 25, 000 crores in only two major industrial towns of Ludhiana and Mandi Gobindgarh. On a decade long scale, the losses on Punjab by these policies run into more than one lakh crore in the form of flight of capital, direct and indirect revenues and employment dip alone. “Thousands of units across the state had shut down. Industry in Punjab has been deliberately made highly non-competitive to an extent that it can no longer survive.”
