NEW DELHI: The Congress has said the centre repackaged and renamed around 23 welfare schemes launched by the previous UPA but has not implemented them well.
The prominent among the schemes are Indira Awas Yojana, renamed as Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, no frills accounts now called Jan Dhan accounts, national manufacturing policy now known as Make in India and several others.
“Can you name any new scheme started in the past three years,” Congress spokesperson Rajeev Shukla said adding that some saffron party advisers had recently admitted having copied the UPA schemes.
Talking about the Jan Dhan accounts, the Congress leader said that out of the 29 crore accounts claimed to have been opened by the centre, 6 crore accounts are dormant and 25 percent accounts have zero balance.
Shukla said that public sector banks admitted to the department of financial services that mass Re 1 deposits were done to reduce the number of zero-balance accounts.
In 2005, the UPA had directed the banks to open "no frills accounts”. There were 43.9 crore bank accounts in the country when UPA came to power in 2004 and the figure rose to 77.32 crore in 2014.
On the Indira Awas Yojana, the Congress leader said that while the UPA constructed 224.37 lakh houses from 2004-2013, which is an average of almost 25 lakh houses per year for rural poor, the Modi government has only constructed 1.7 lakh houses in the past three years, an average of about 56,600 houses per year.
Terming the Make in India programme a failure, he said the manufacturing sector grew at 0.1 percent in July, the lowest in several quarters.
The Congress leader further said that the centre renamed the National Girl Child Day Programme of the UPA to “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” scheme which much fanfare, but in 2016-17 of the budgeted Rs 100 cr, the government released merely Rs 43 cr and utilised only Rs 5 cr.
Noting that as per the 2011 census, there are 632 lakh girls below 15 years of age, he said the annual allocation comes to a pittance of Rs 1.26 per girl.