Budget 2015 focusses only on corporates, income tax payers: P Chidambaram

NEW DELHI: Former Finance Minister P Chidambaram today tore into the Union Budget alleging that it was "unkind" to the poor and was leaning heavily in favour of the corporates and could fail the targeted 8 per cent growth next year.

"This Budget has been unkind to the poor is the kindest thing I can say about it", the senior Congress leader told reporters at the AICC headquarters.

Lamenting that the allocations of a lot of schemes and programmes aimed at the poor including health has been reduced than those during the UPA regime, he said that despite huge benefit due to lowering of global crude prices, government has failed to take advantage.

He said it is a "tall claim" that the economy would achieve 8 per cent growth rate next year as "everyone must pull their weight together to achieve this and it cannot be achieved on the shoulders of the corporates and the IT paying class"

"After the Economic Survey, one had thought of a Victor Hugo moment, Budget has dashed this...", he said in apparent reference to the remarks of Manmohan Singh while presenting the 1991-92 "historic" budget.

("Victor Hugo once said, 'No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come'... Let the whole world hear it loud and clear. India is now wide awake", Singh had said presenting the budget that helped to not just restore investor confidence, but also unleashed the era of economic reforms.)

Chidambaram said "one cannot avoid feeling that this Budget leans heavily in favour of corporate sector and Income tax paying class.....But it does not find acknowledging and addressing the concerns of 100 crore poor". Besides, he said that the poor have been burdened with increases in Excise duty and Service Tax.

The former Finance Minister rejected the Prime Minister's charge that the UPA dispensation was not much sincere in unearthing black money.

Detailing the steps taken when he was the Finance Minister on the matter, he said he has not come across any information the new government has collected and it was working on the "information that we have collected" from Swiss authorities.

He said the SIT was not constituted as the Supreme Court order had come in the last days of the UPA government.

Chidambaram also took exception to the Prime Minister's statement ridiculing the MGNREGA and hoped that he would reconsider it. He said that it is a fact that millions of people were still living in extreme poverty despite anti-poverty programmes launched by successive governments.

"It is a very unkind remark. Poor will take it as a snub, a slight", he remarked.