New Delhi: Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s aggressive speech in the Lok Sabha was powered by some background research from his team which called out the bluff behind the budget proposal of 1 crore internships for unemployed youth in the country.
The problem of high unemployment in the country had been flagged by Rahul Gandhi who gave a guarantee to provide the first job for a year to all qualified youth during the Lok Sabha campaign.
According to party insiders, the top 500 companies in India employed only 1 percent of the 56.5 crore workforce which worked out to 72 lakhs.
“Hence it was not possible for the 500 companies which employed 72 lakh people to take 1 crore interns,” AICC functionary BM Sandeep Kumar told ETV Bharat.
“The finance minister said they will nudge the companies to take interns but the fact is that over the past 10 years around 41 companies were coerced through ED and CBI raids to donate funds to the tune of Rs 2500 crores to the BJP as revealed by the Electoral Bonds data,” he said.
Further, the central government completely ignored the problem of joblessness as around 10.3 crore youths had given up looking for jobs and the informal sector which employed 90 percent of the country’s workforce was struggling. Also, that around 72 percent of the youth did not pursue higher education and around half of the graduates were unemployable.
The party insiders further highlighted the anomalies in the central government’s approach to dealing with the problem of unemployment by saying that as compared to the previous UPA II government, the Modi governments had been reducing expenditure on the education sector.
“Over the past years, the UPA II government prioritized the education sector and accordingly spent an average of 4.73 percent of the budget on education. In the last 10 years the Modi government only reduced it from 3.8 percent of the budget in the first term, 2.9 percent in second term and now 2.5 percent in the third term,” said a senior AICC functionary.
According to party insiders, the party’s background research further showed that the informal sector lost around 16.45 lakh jobs during the period 2026 to 2022 and the manufacturing sector was worst hit during the Covid period losing 9 percent of business and 15 percent workers.
“If the informal sector was growing at the UPA rate, there would have been 63 lakhs more businesses employing 1.6 crore more people. Contrast this with government data that showed that between financial years 2020 and 2023, the profit before tax of the companies grew four times,” Congress media head Pawan Khera told ETV Bharat.
He further said that the budget had not made any provisions for the Caste Census as promised by Rahul Gandhi and that even the regular census 2021 had been ignored by the central government which led to the LoP leveling the charge that the NDA regime was only focused on the rich and the influential and was not evenly distributing the goodies ‘Halwa’ among the majority of the people.
