NEW DELHI: Terming the Delhi government’s Budget as “directionless” and “visionless”, Opposition parties BJP and Congress said that there is nothing new in the proposals for people living in the city. The Opposition party leaders said Finance Minister Kailash Gahlot read the Budget like a serial for two hours and 27 minutes.
The nine schemes announced in the name of ‘Clean, Beautiful and Modern Delhi’ are all old. Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva said after a long discussion on the Budget of the Delhi government when it was finally presented on Wednesday, an old saying has been found fitting to describe it, ‘Khoda Pahar Nikli Chuhiya’. “In important sectors like health, transport and social welfare, the government has reduced the allocation and it is almost the same in education, but the real character of the government is exposed with the Budget allocation of the MCD,” he said.
BJP leaders said for the last eight years, BJP used to ask this government to increase the budget of the MCD, but it used to cut the budget due to political malice. Now, the Delhi government has made an unprecedented increase in the budget of the corporation as soon as the party got power, Sachdeva said. Last year, MCD got Rs 4,794 crore, which has now been increased to Rs 8,241 crore.
Leader of Opposition in the Delhi Legislative Assembly Ramvir Singh Bidhuri said the city government had already breached the secrecy of the Budget. Now, a bundle of lies in the form of the Budget has been presented. It has lost credibility too. This is a directionless, boring budget and this is going to take Delhi on the path of destruction. Delhi Congress leader Anil Bhardwaj said that the Budget was ‘old wine in a new bottle’ without vision or policy direction. He said the Budget offers no hope for the people, except some empty promises, like in the previous budgets of the government, though the outlay has almost tripled to Rs 78,800 crore for 2023-24 compared to the 2014-15 outlay.
“The Kejriwal Government comes up with fancy names for the Budget, but those promises are never fulfilled, like last year’s Rozgar Budget, which had promised five lakh jobs per year for five years, but only 1,000 jobs were created last year,” he said. Bhardway demanded that the unemployed youth of Delhi should be given unemployment allowance which Kejriwal had been promising in other states.
