Congress calls Budget 2016 as wasted opportunity

New Delhi: The main Opposition Congress’ top guns — party vice-president Rahul Gandhi, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and former Union finance minister P. Chidambaram — on Monday criticised the Union Budget for 2016-17 as a “wasted opportunity” and said the third exercise of the Modi government lacked vision had no “big idea” and was “just housekeeping and accounting”.

Leading the party’s offensive, Mr Gandhi asserted that the Budget was “mere rhetoric”, while Dr Singh dubbed it as “nit-picking”.

While reminding the Modi government of how it had “mocked” the Congress earlier on MGNREGA and now it had increased the allocation to the rural job flagship scheme launched by the UPA government 10 years ago by over Rs 3,800 crore for 2016-17, he said, “Modiji spent the first two years mocking the Congress party’s focus on farmers, MGNREGA, rural development and social spending. Now mere rhetoric, without vision or action, will fool neither farmers nor the poor,” Mr Gandhi said.

In further tweets, Mr Gandhi said the Budget “lacks both vision & conviction”. He tweeted that the exercise was a list of “new promises without any account of the failure of tall promises made in last 2 budgets”.