Mumbai, June 28 (IANS) Terming the Maharashtra budget full of “empty promises”, Shiv Sena-UBT President and former Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray on Friday demanded a White Paper on all the assurances made by the MahaYuti government in the past two years.
“There is a flood of hollow promises in the budget… The (MahaYuti) government has been doing it for the past two years. They should set up a committee of experts and release a White Paper to inform the reality of how many announcements were actually fulfilled by them,” he said.
Thackeray said tired of the falsehoods perpetrated in the past 10 years, the people have taught the MahaYuti a lesson in the recent Lok Sabha elections and they have opened their eyes a little.
“However, the people are not naive… The electorate has rejected them twice and they (the people) still have no faith in the false narrative of the state budget. With elections around the corner, they have made a flood of big announcements, but will they really fulfil them? This may turn out to be a ‘jumla’ again like in the past,” he said.
Taking a swipe at the MahaYuti, Thackeray said that the budget has hiked the allocation for the Maulana Azad Minority Economic Development Corporation, “so does it mean that they have given up Hindutva”.
He said that it was a relief that the government had accepted the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA)’s demand for waiving of farmers’ electricity bills, “but has done nothing about the other demands of full loan write-off, and other farming inputs on which heavy loot continues in different forms”, and now the tillers will have to wait for the Assembly elections before their woes are addressed.
Referring to the ‘Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin’ (Chief Minister’s My Beloved Sister) scheme, Thackeray said that though the initiative is welcome, “we want that along with the beloved sister, the beloved brother should not be ignored” as lakhs of boys are roaming around unemployed and need jobs, and they should not be discriminated against.
–IANS
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