Leader of Opposition in the Delhi Assembly and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Atishi on Friday strongly criticized the Delhi government’s budget and wondered if it would be able to garner a whopping ₹1 lakh crore income in revenue. The absence of a pre-budget economic survey is worrying, she added, as the budget is a ‘hawa hawa’ (unrealistic and baseless) one.
Alleging that the Delhi BJP government neither has gained nor can earn ₹1 lakh crore, Atishi said this while addressing a press conference in the national capital. She said the ruling party had broken a 70-year-old parliamentary tradition of presenting the Economic Survey before the Budget by hiding financial details. She said that this was a measure to cover up exaggerated economic figures.
In fact, Atishi specifically targeted the estimated tax revenue projection for Delhi around which Arvind Kejriwal built his case of making the greatest difference to Delhi’s fortunes: ₹68,700 crore here — she said it was completely ‘fake’. But she contended that had the Economic Survey been presented, the government would have been unable to give such inflated revenue numbers. She, however, remarked, “Till now, the BJP made false promises, but now they have started making false claims in the Budget too.”
Atishi took note of the fiscal issues, ruing that under AAP’s governance, Delhi had a fiscal surplus while the first BJP-led budget had a deficit of ₹13,000 crore. She also noted that since the Delhi GDP collection is gaining at just a 20 per cent increase, it is not a reality that the national GDP will increase by 6.5 per cent.
On March 27, while speaking on the Budget, Atishi praised the Chief Minister, saying that the cultural remarks on Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb were an indication of unity. But she attributed the Budget to the BJP as a ‘party of slogans’ rather than substance. An example from Uttar Pradesh was cited by her, where the Assembly Speaker had refused to declare a Budget to be adopted without an Economic Survey.
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