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AHMEDABAD: Union minister for textiles Shankersinh Vaghela compared Chief Minister Narendra Modi's declaration of Rs 12.5 lakh crore MoUs signed in Vibrant Gujarat as a Bunty and Babli' job, taking from the Bollywood film on a fraudster couple.
Like the duo in the film, Modi and his government were cheating people by "picking their pockets to fill those of industrialists", he said at a press conference on Friday. In the name of Vibrant Gujarat, precious money of tax payers was wasted, "Instead, the money spent on organising this could have been diverted to diamond workers to prevent them from committing suicide," said Vaghela.
According to Vaghela, each of these MoUs would need 80% finance from institutions for the projects, which means industrialists would require Rs 10 lakh crore from financial institutions, but going by the figures of Reserve Bank of India, the gross bank credit permissible in industrial sector was Rs 1.74 lakh crore for the entire country, so how could Gujarat alone borrow such a huge sum.
Using Modi's popular terminology during the 2002 election campaign, Vaghela said, "Calling some Aliya, Maliya and Jamaliya (Tom, Dick, Harry) to sign MoUs is only an effort to improve his image"
Challenging Modi's claim that there was no recession in Gujarat, he said, "If this is true, I dare the business houses to bring out IPOs by March". He claimed all the MoUs had no legal standing.
On Ratan Tata's remark that he was no longer stupid, Vaghela said, "Definitely they are not stupid, but state government is stupid to give such subsidies and relaxation out of tax payers' money".
Citing a commerce ministry document, Vaghela said, projects worth Rs 25,000 crore were shelved in the last quarter of December last, of which Rs 23,000 worth were from Gujarat. |