I have never said that tax will have to be increased to fund NYAY. It has been taken out of context, said Sam Pitroda, Congress Leader, in an interview with ETNOW.
Edited excerpts:
There has been a lot of debate on Congress NYAY scheme. You have been quoted as saying that to raise the money, tax rates will have to be raised. What do you say to that?
Twenty million families will get Rs 72,000 a year. I have never said that it will require you to increase tax. It was as usual taken out of context. Chidambaram has said it publicly. Rahul Gandhi has said it publicly. Lot of economists have worked on it. It is a viable scheme. It would not require any increase in tax.
Where will the money then come from?
Where did the money come from for NREGA? As you expand your economy, you can grow 10%. There will be a larger tax base. There will be more people joining the economy. Same set of questions were raised when NREGA was introduced. If we can do NREGA, why cant we do this? Why did you ask that? We are known for creating jobs. We have created millions and millions of jobs in the past. These people have no idea on how to create jobs. I can give you my own example in telecom. When we started telecom, there were two million phones in this country. Today there are 1.2 billion phones. Nobody talks about that. How did you think all that happened? There was zero software export. We do $150 billion worth of software export every year year after year. How did that happen? We know how to do it.
What is the plan you have when it comes to job creation? When you go to a voter, do you share a plan?
This is not a plan which has been put together without a thought. It is not about gimmicks and making promises that you never meet. We talk about jobs after having gone through all the analysis. Let me give you one example. In Rajiv Gandhis time, we had technology missions on oilseeds. From importing nearly billion dollar worth oilseeds, we had become nearly self-sufficient in oilseeds production. Today we import Rs 82,000 crore worth of edible oil. Why? Why cannot we produce edible oil in this country? Why cannot we convince our farmers to focus on mustard, soya bean, sunflower seed, rapeseed, palm oil? We have enough land. If we use that idea, we can create 10 million jobs just in oil seeds. We import Rs 4,000 crore worth of tRead More – Source
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