AITUC terms the Budget as ‘hoax’

Trade unions to stage protests from February 24

The All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) has described the recently presented Union Budget as ‘hoax’ and said the budget introduced in Parliament was ‘directionless’.

The budget which favoured corporates in the form of tax concessions of 22% and 15% in two slabs, however, failed to provide relief to lower and middle income groups which were facing problems on account of price rise and other issues. In fact, subsidies to farmers were removed resulting in growing indebtedness among the ryots. “The Finance Minister played a cruel joke in claiming that the income of farmers will be doubled and falsely claimed that the debt burden of the country has been reduced,” AITUC general secretary Amarjeet Kaur said.

Speaking to reporters here on Friday, Ms. Kaur said the health sector had been pushed towards privatisation in the name of public private partnership mode and the budgetary allocations to education sector were aimed at attracting foreign direct investments without any commitment for the betterment of the government sector education.

Privatisation of education

The new education policy was actually aimed at privatisation and commercialisation of education excluding vast majority of poor and lower middle class families from its ambit. The spending on social sector had been reduced as also the budgetary allocation to the MGNREGA and other social welfare schemes.

The announcement on allowing private sector to build data centre parks had hidden dangers of exposing the people to all kinds of intimidations as well as misuse of data by market forces. The Finance Minister who started her budget speech claiming that people voted for development ought to explain as to why the Central government was focussing on tactics of division and hatred among different sections.

Labour code

The central trade unions in their joint meeting on February 6 decided to launch campaign against the “anti-people policies” of the government. Accordingly, it was decided to stage protests against codification of labour laws at factory/enterprise levels between February 24 and March 2. This would be followed by publicly burning the copies of labour codes as and when the relevant bills were introduced in the Lok Sabha, she said.