Leader of Opposition in the Legislative Assembly Siddaramaiah has said that there has been a gradual increase in the borrowings in the last three years and it has doubled in this budget to Rs. 1,37,000 crore, with no capital assets. He said here on Friday that the revenue surplus had come down to Rs. 930 crore, which was likely to come down further. “In a nutshell, Karnataka has gone 10 years backward,” he said. Moreover, there was only 60 per cent expenditure last year in both the agriculture and other fields, defeating the very objective of the budget.
Mr. Siddaramaiah said that the budget also showed that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s claim of the two global investors meets attracting lakhs of crores of investment as “bogus”. He predicted that growth might decline further after two months as it was only estimates. “This will neither help farmers nor it will increase foodgrains production,” he said.
Not a single megawatt of power had been generated during the last five years and whatever extra power generation that had been done was the result of programmes initiated during the earlier governments.
Mr. Siddaramaiah said that the Bharatiya Janata Party could neither implement its manifesto nor the programmes announced in its four budgets. This budget, he said, could be called another election manifesto, which it had not taken seriously. Criticising the proposal to sell rice at Rs. 2 a kg to poor families, he asked why the government did not announce this in the first year of its governance.
The only achievement of Mr. Shettar, he said was that he could fulfil his life’s ambition of presenting a budget, which he took three-and-a-half hours to read, which was again a record.
