Neither UPA nor NDA could tackle job crisis: Gandhi in LS

The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, on Monday presented an alternative vision of the President's speech that he said would have focused on the technological revolution, solving the unemployment problem, boosting industrial systems to take on China and a more representative vision of development model that included marginalized communities.

- HT Correspondent

NEW DELHI:

Speaking on the Motion of Thanks on the President's address, Gandhi centered his address around on what a presidential address under an INDIA bloc government would look like - he called the address delivered by President Droupadi Murmu last week a laundry list of government achievements - focusing on building capabilities in critical areas to take on China, ensuring that banking systems were accessible to all, a foreign policy that took into account the technological revolution, and a model of development based on data from the caste census.

In a candid admission, Gandhi acknowledged that neither the United Progressive Alliance nor the National Democratic Alliance governments were able to tackle unemployment and said that while the Make in India programme was a "good idea", it was now clear that it had failed.

"Even though we have grown, the universal problem we face is that we have not been able to tackle the problem of unemployment. Neither the UPA, nor the NDA government has given an answer to this issue. The PM proposed Make in India-I think it was a good idea- but we saw statues, functions and advertisements. And the share of the manufacturing sector in the GDP has fallen from 15.3% to 12.6%, which is the lowest in 60 years," Gandhi said.

"What and how are we going to solve this unemployment problem? By organizing consumption and production. Pretty much every government since the 1990s did a decent job in organizing consumption. But the record of the country in organizing production is dismal...what we have done is that we have handed over the organization of production to the Chinese," he said, adding that due to rising unemployment, social tension was on the rise in India.