NEW DELHI: The Congress on Saturday launched a scathing attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi for not making efforts to arrest economic slowdown. Speaking at a gathering of party workers at a ‘halla bol’ (raise your voice) rally, Delhi Congress president Subhash Chopra said that the PM had kept undertaking foreign trips while the country was in the grip of economic slump and severe unemployment crisis.
Claiming that new private investments in the country have hit a 16-year low, the Congress leader further alleged that the Modi Government had failed on the economic front.
“Household savings are at a 20-year low, and India’s overall savings rate has declined to 30 per cent from 34.6% earlier. The Government has not given any attention to industrial development,” said Chopra, addressing the rally at Adarsh Nagar.
“Industrial growth shrank to 1.1 per cent in August, which is the lowest in the last seven-year. The manufacturing growth rate is at 1.2%, lowest since October 2014 and the Core Sector Growth is also the lowest in the last four years, due to the wrong policies of the Modi Government. Exports are in a free fall, as in August 2019, exports fell by 6.6 per cent,” said the Delhi Congress chief.
He further added that 21 of 29 major commodities, which account for 66.4 per cent of the export bill, had recorded decline.
“These declines show that the policies and programmes of the Modi Government have completely collapsed,” he said.
Present at the rally were former Delhi Congress president Jai Prakash Agarwal and several senior leaders including former Delhi ministers. At a separate rally in Krishna Nagar, former Delhi minister and city unit president Arvinder Singh Lovely addressed the party workers.
“The biggest readymade cloth market in Asia — Gandhi Nagar was facing very low business as people have no funds to make purchases. The central Government is ruining the lives of the common people as their small savings were brought under the category of black money during demonetisation. It was a gross injustice to them,” he said.
He further added that people from all strata of society are against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and that once the time is right, they will teach the Modi Government a befitting lesson.