“Every Government initiative results in subsidising the rich and taxing the poor, and the government at the centre is functioning like UPA III”, is how Saji Narayanan, a Sangh Parivar leader described Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in a recent article in Outlook India.
The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) president is the latest critic of the government and its policies after Yashwant Sinha.
Narayanan spoke about a recent 26 May event at the National Institute for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog, where a Harvard professor highlighted how the government was not “engaging seriously in the social and economic progress” of India.
The BMS has engaged in shadow-boxing with the NITI Aayog, which replaced the Nehruvian Planning Commission in 2015, by delivering scathing attacks on its policy blunders.
Narayanan rebuked the foreign and NRI advisors chosen by the government who were the “people that paved the way for an easy exit for Manmohan Singh” but then “changed colours and began advising the present government”.
With job losses exceeding job creation, Narayanan said “the government forgets that important sectors which are labour intensive are in a collapsed state.”
He added that this failure has occurred due to lack of communication of the government with these sectors and that it will need “some sort of magic to claim job creation in these sectors”.
The BMS president termed GST and demonetisation as “historic and revolutionary steps which were badly implemented without considering ground-level practical realities.”
He said that labour was in a “tragic state” and those in the government were “trying to create a labour force devoid of human rights”.
The BMS will be holding a rally to the parliament on 17 November to raise sector-wise demands including “shifting to a people-centric economic reforms, implementation of minimum wages and social security to the last worker in the unorganised sector, implementation of equal pay for equal work for contract labour throughout the country, stopping of disinvestment and privatisation”.
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