Cricketer-turned-politician Navjot Singh Sidhu said on Monday that Prime Minister Narendra Modi “will drown in a wave created by lies” and attacked the Union government for its “failed policies.”
Addressing a press conference, Mr. Sidhu claimed that most of the Central schemes had failed to meet their targets. Be it Namame Gange, the government’s flagship programme to clean the Ganga river, or Digital India, the government’s record had always been of making tall claims.
Mr. Sidhu said the Centre had spent only ₹6,000 crore of the planned ₹20,000 crore on cleaning river Ganga. It was the Supreme court’s observation that at the rate at which the government was going about the job, it would take 200 years to make the Ganga clean again, he said.
He alleged that schemes like MUDRA had been unable to help the youth, as the average loan sanctioned in the scheme was only ₹46,000 and an RTI application had revealed that barely 1 per cent of the applicants were able to receive loans above ₹5 lakh. “Mudra yojana, which Modiji claims has helped the youth to set up businesses, has been a big failure... The average loan amount has also been very low,” he said.
The Congress leader from Punjab alleged that Skill India programme had almost 40 per cent ghost entries. Also, the Skill Development Ministry had not managed to fulfil the target of 40 crore trainees by 2020. It had only been able to train 41 lakh people. And only 6 lakh of those who were trained managed to get jobs.
“We believe that 40 per cent of the entries in these centres were ghost [entries] and this requires an investigation,” he said.
