Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal today said the State Congress is trying to project a deceptive image of the fiscal health of the SAD- BJP government despite the fact that Punjab had the lowest debt among all States and had incurred productive debt only.
Participating in the debate on the State budget, the Deputy CM appealed to the opposition benches not to malign the State for their selfish political reasons but analyse the budget as well as the State's fiscal health by taking a holistic view taking all factors into consideration.
In his message to the opposition, Mr Badal said "I appeal to everyone to support our positive initiatives and desist from criticism for the sake of criticism".
Badal demolished all the contentions of the opposition by presenting the real facts before the assembly. While talking about the assertions made by Mr Lal Singh of the Congress, he said the member had presented wrong facts before the House. He said against a total public sector undertaking debt of over Rs 67,000 crore, as much as Rs 48,000 was the food credit limit. He said out of the remaining Rs 19,700 crore debt left, as much as Rs 11,000 crore was productive debt incurred by PSPCL to create infrastructure including transmission lines. He listed other productive expenditure also before concluding that the net debt was only Rs 6,000 crore.
Speaking about the State debt, Mr Badal presented figures to show that he Rs 1 lakh debt incurred by Punjab was among the lowest in the country. He also presented facts to show that other State governments had seen a whopping increase in State debt since 2002 as compared to Punjab. Among the figures he gave, he stated that the debt of Haryana has increased by 325 per cent to become Rs 75,310 crore now from only Rs 17730 crore in 2002. He said similarly the debt of Andhra Pradesh had increased by 294 percent from Rs 48,000 crore in 2002 to 1.94 crore presently.
The Deputy CM also listed economic parameters to show that Punjab was on the path of growth and that debt to GDP was only 31 per cent now as compared to a percentage of 46 per cent in 2007. He said the Union government itself had a total debt of 56 lakh crore which came to 50 per cent of its GDP.Mr Badal also listed steps taken by the government including the Punjab Investment department which was bearing fruit and becoming a model for the entire country. He said as many as 16 projects had been sanctioned in the last two months of which 50 per cent were food processing units.