Montek briefs Congress MPs
With Congress president Sonia Gandhi asking party MPs to go aggressive in countering the BJP’s “oust Prime Minister campaign”, Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia has been roped in to brief the parliamentarians of the ruling party to apprise them of the finer nuances of the CAG report on coal block allocation.
Since Dr Ahluwalia recently explained through a presentation, a copy of which is with this newspaper, to young Congress MPs at Jawahar Bhavan here, many of the other vocal party leaders, including AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh and one of the lead party spokesmen, Mr Manish Tewari, have met the deputy chairman individually and discussed with him various national economic parameters to counter the ongoing Opposition tirade against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Sources in Yojna Bhavan revealed that Mr Tewari on Thursday evening met Dr Ahluwalia and discussed the CAG report with him in detail. “He (Mr Tewari) had some queries about the computation of the loss figure arrived at in the CAG report.”
Similarly, Mr Singh also met the deputy chairman and is learnt to have sought some clarifications on the issue of “controversial poverty line”.
Meanwhile, Dr Ahluwalia, in his presentation to the MPs, threw light on the “current slowdown”, “revolution of rising expectations”, “importance of growth being inclusive”, “energy constraints”, “looming water crisis” and “challenges of urbanisation”.
Dr Ahluwalia also gave a comparative picture on GDP growth, agriculture growth, growth in per capita consumption in rural areas, decline in poverty ratio and also in real term between the NDA period (1997-98 to 2003-04) and the UPA period (2004-05 to 2011-12).
In his presentation, Dr Ahluwalia informed that if the average GDP growth during the NDA period was 6 per cent, then during UPA it has been 8.2 per cent.
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