Chandigarh, Oct 5 (PTI) The BJP on Thursday slammed the AAP government in Punjab over the state’s debt burden and blamed the Bhagwant Mann dispensation’s “wrong policies” for its “poor fiscal health”.
Jaiveer Shergill, the BJP’s national spokesperson, said in a statement issued here that his concerns have been proven correct with the government admitting to have borrowed more than Rs 47,000 crore during its short tenure.
“It would be an understatement to say that Punjab’s economy is in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), gasping for breath on a ventilator. It is the AAP government’s wrong policies and economic mismanagement that is squarely responsible for the prevailing scenario,” he said.
Shergill said Mann himself had admitted that the state’s financial position is “strained”, referring to the chief minister’s recent letter to the governor on Punjab’s debt.
The BJP leader said details of the utilisation of the loan amount mentioned in the letter clearly showed that the AAP government has contributed Rs 47,107.6 crore to the state’s debt in the past one-and-a-half years.
“This completely belies the claims of the Mann government that the state’s economy is in the pink of health. It rather establishes that the economy is in the doldrums,” Shergill claimed.
Mann on Tuesday wrote to Governor Banwarilal Purohit over the issue of borrowings, saying a “mammoth” Rs 27,000 crore went into repaying interest on debts that were inherited.
Responding to a letter from the governor, Mann wrote that his government borrowed around Rs 47,000 crore — Rs 32,447 crore in 2022-23 and Rs 14,660 crore from April to August this year.
Shergill, the BJP spokesperson, said the AAP government is “completely visionless and clueless”.
Even the budget for the 2023-24 fiscal lacked any new avenues of enhancing revenue collection despite immediate steps being required to address the problem of the state’s “ever-worsening financial crisis”, he said.
“In reality, the government has no vision to create resources for revenue generation so that the state could be brought out of the red. It remains entrenched in the vicious debt trap,” Shergill asserted.
Last month, Mann had urged the governor to take up the issue of the pending Rural Development Fund (RDF), amounting to Rs 5,637.40 crore, with the president and the prime minister.
In his reply, Purohit had said he learnt that the debt of Punjab rose by about Rs 50,000 crore during the AAP regime and sought details of utilisation of this “huge amount” so that he could convince the prime minister that the money was properly utilised. PTI CHS SZM
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