Sharmila describes budget as directionless

Vijayawada: President of Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee YS Sharmila Reddy described the first budget of the NDA government as nothing but the jugglery of numbers and without direction. Reacting to the presentation of the budget in the Assembly, she said in a statement here on Friday that the budget had totally forgotten the promises the NDA made during the elections and it was against the people’s aspirations. There was hardly any mention of Super Six in the budget and the other promises were thrown to the wind.

The PCC chief said that allocation of Rs 6,300 crore for Annadaata Sukhibhava was meagre.

At a time the 54 lakh farmers in the state are waiting for some solace which needs Rs 11,000 crore, waiting for the matching grant from the Central government was unjust. The farmers are in dire straits since there was no remunerative price for the produce, the allocation of RS 300 crore for price stabilisation fund was like throwing alms.

There is a drastic cut in the fund allocation for the Talliki Vandanam scheme. The 84 lakh stu-dents across the state needed Rs 12,600 crore, but the allocation was mere Rs 9,407 crore. Does that mean the number of students would be reduced for the amount of Rs 3,000 crore?

Likewise, Rs 4,500 crore was needed for Deepam-2 scheme per annum. However, the alloca-tion was only Rs 2,601 crore. It means that the government was going to reduce the number of beneficiaries by half out of 1.5 crore families.

There was no mention of free bus service for women in the budget, she pointed out stating that the government was not willing to allocate Rs 350 crore per month out of the budget of Rs 3 lakh crore for the scheme.

The PCC chief also stated there was no mention of Mahasakthi scheme which offers Rs 1500 to the 1.5 crore women.

The DWCRA women groups were also cheated by not allocating a single rupee for the interest-free loans of Rs 10 lakh for each group. Also, there is no mention of unemployment dole and the job calendar in the budget. Not a single rupee was allocated for unemployment dole cheating the 50 lakh unemployed persons.