New Delhi: Even as Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal slammed the Union government over the FY 22-23 Budget, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said it was "extremely negative" for the Capital — noting that despite other states getting 42 per cent of Central taxes, the city's funds were capped at Rs 325 crore also adding that the Budget did not allocate anything for the city's civic bodies.
Sisodia said that the share in Central taxes has been capped for Delhi at Rs 325 crore for the last 21 years. In a press conference on Tuesday evening, Delhi Finance Minister said, "Giving Delhi only Rs 325 crore out of the budget of Rs 8.16 lakh crore allocated for the share of all states in central taxes shows the negative attitude of the central government towards the people of Delhi."
And even as the city's civic bodies are reeling under the worst fund shortage, Sisodia said the Union government had not allocated anything to the three municipal bodies (North, East and South MCDs) despite allocating Rs 69,421 crore to civic bodies across the rest of the country.
In addition to this, the Delhi minister went on to say that the Budget had left the common man to fend for themselves.
He said that saying the Centre had added 60 lakh jobs in five years was nothing more than a false statement. "What will you do with these jobs when 5.5 crore people roam unemployed in the present? The PLI scheme under which the Centre wants to generate employment has not created one job in two years," he said.
Moreover, calling the Centre "high-headed", Sisodia, who is the Covid-19 nodal minister as well, said that it had not learned any lessons from the pandemic and had chosen to keep health allocation the same as last year. Figures showed that health expenditure had been reduced significantly, citing that there was no longer as much demand for vaccines.
Sisodia, who is also Delhi's Education Minister, added that education not only faced huge blows during the pandemic but also in the Union government's Budget. "The New Education Policy of which this government made a mountain of a molehill said that the Centre must allocate 6 per cent of its Budget to education for this policy to become a reality. But in reality, the Centre is reducing the education budget from 2.67 per cent to 2.64 per cent. The budget for skilling was reduced by a staggering 30 per cent," he said.
The Deputy CM also said that the country needed some relief in income tax slabs, which would have gone a long way to help the middle-class salaried population increase their purchasing power, which would, in turn, increase consumer expenditure. "But even that has not been done," he said.